Put into a sentence, the changed warfare amounts to this: it is a mobilization of material, of railroads, great guns, machine guns, food, airplanes and other engines of destruction quite as much as it is a mobilization of men. The Germans won battle after battle at the beginning of the war because of their system of strategic railways that made it possible to transport huge armies to selected points in the shortest possible time both on the eastern and the western fronts. Lacking a system of transportation to match this, Russia lost the great battles that decided her fate, Belgium was over-run, and France, once the border was passed, became a battle-field upon which the Germans might extend their trench systems over the face of the land. Lacking strategic railways to match those of Germany, France evolved an effective substitute in the modern system of automobile transportation. When von Kluck swung aside from Paris in his first great rush, Gallieni sent out from Paris an army in taxicabs that struck the exposed flank and went far toward winning the first battle of the Marne. It was the truck transportation system of the French along the famous "Sacred Road" back of the battle line at Verdun that kept inviolate the motto of the heroic town, "They Shall Not Pass." Motor trucks that brought American reserves in a khaki flood won the second battle of the Marne. It was automobile transportation that enabled Haig to send the British Canadians and Australians in full cry after the retreating Germans when the backbone of the German resistance was broken before Lens, Cambrai, and Ostend. America's railway transportation system in France was one of the marvels of the war. Stretching from the sector of seacoast set apart for America by the French Government, it radiated far into the interior, delivering men, munitions and food in a steady stream. American engineers worked with their brothers-in-arms with the Allies to construct an inter-weaving system of wide-gauge and narrow-gauge roads that served to victual and munition the entire front and further serve to deliver at top speed whole army corps. It was this network of strategic railways that enabled the French to send an avalanche clad in horizon-blue to the relief of Amiens when Hindenburg made his final tremendous effort of 1918. In its essentials, military effort in the great conflict may be roughly divided into Open warfare, Trench warfare, Crater warfare. The first battle of the Marne was almost wholly open warfare; so also were the battles of the Masurian Lakes, Allenstein, and Dunajec in the eastern theater of war, and most of the warfare on the Italian front between the Piave River and Gorizia.