Watching the firing, I could not perceive that ours was doing much harm; while that of the enemy certainly was not. Occasionally a few yards of our trenches was blown in, and a man or two destroyed; but the impression left on my mind was that trench warfare would go on for ever, unless some more effective force than mere artillery fire were brought to bear on an army so protected: and shelling a position is a very expensive mode of warfare. I afterwards saw that to destroy a hundred yards of trench cost 4,000 or 5,000 shells; and even then the defending force nearly always contrived to make good a retreat to a second, or third, line of defence. To shell an enemy out of a good defensive position is, I believe, an impossibility; therefore permanent fortresses should be constructed on the lines of a system of trenches, the guns being placed in Moncrieff pits or other specially constructed emplacements. I am quite convinced that unless guns are hidden, their destruction is assured. Modern gunfire is as accurate as that of rifle-shooting: it will, therefore, easily hit any mark which the gunners can locate. Everybody knows that patience is a virtue, and that it generally obtains a reward. Our turn came. The 40th Siberians, better known to the men by an unpronounceable name, which, never having seen it in print, I cannot pretend to spell, were ordered to cross the Vistula on the morning of the 20th October. I expected that there would have been some fighting; but there was not. The rain was falling in a steady downpour; and we could not see the opposite bank of the river. Perhaps the wet damped the ardour of the Germans. Certainly I should think that the autumn and winter of 1914-15 was the wettest ever known. The right bank of the river was bad enough, but the left was the softest marsh we had so far experienced. No wonder the Germans could no longer make much resistance: their trenches were full of water. I slipped into one, and thought I was going to be drowned. Fortunately for me a couple of the men stopped to assist me; for there was six or seven feet of water in the wretched trench. Many of our men met with similar accidents, and I am not sure that some of them did not lose their lives. I saw the bodies of Germans floating in their ditches, but these may have been men killed previously to the flooding. It was entirely an infantry fight. We had crossed the river on rafts towed by boats, and could bring no guns; while those of the enemy which could be moved they were anxiously striving to save, and did not stop to fire. Many of their heavy guns they destroyed to render them useless to us, but a number of machine-guns were brought into action on each side.