Through the vast store of knowledge acquired in this way Mr. Belloc enjoys an advantage in his treatment of the present war which cannot be overestimated. In writing of the country in which the campaigns of to-day are taking place he is not writing of country as he sees it on the map. To him that country is not, as to the majority of Englishmen it is, a conglomeration of patches, some heavily, some lightly shaded, of larger and smaller dots, joined and intersected by an almost meaningless maze of thin and thick lines. To him that country is hills and vales, woods and fields, rivers and swamps, real things he has seen and among which he has moved. As an example of this we may perhaps give his description of the line of the Argonne which occurs on page 157 of _The French Revolution_: The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the south northward, a good deal to the west of north. Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded, from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details, because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed. These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated the range. Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very little choice in the crossing of these hills. We may compare with this extract a most remarkable description of country given by Mr. Belloc in his article on "The Great Offensive" in the issue of _Land and Water_ of October 2, 1915. Describing the chief movement in Champagne, he points out that the French advanced on a front of seventeen and a half miles from the village of Auberive to the market town of Ville-sur-Tourbe. He continues: