With the second phase of the battle the pulsing, stirring features of the old warfare largely disappeared. There was no longer the crowded rustle of the ranks, except when men crept in the semi-darkness from their trenches and attacked in the open against barbed wire and murderous missiles. The long, sinuous line of red, with its sheen and shimmer of weapons glancing back the sun, gay plumes to give a nodding note of youth, almost of feminine finery, had passed to the limbo of military museums and the pages of the historians of past battles. None of these things; instead, men in musty garments, covered with dust in summer or the mud of winter rains, and, in place of the cavalry charge in the open, the terrible twilight war began. Those who waged it shirked the daylight, dwelt in pits and crouched in dark ramparts as if the sight of God’s good sun shamed them. Gone was the brave display riotous in colour and glory, glittering from ten thousand points. In its place was a lone and dismal landscape, a drab expanse of trenches interminably long; of furrows deeply drawn through the earth hiding living grain in their depths. Singular country, like some vast cemetery, stretching indefinitely towards a dull horizon dead in its outer aspects, and yet hiding in its bowels the quick and the dead, the living happily outnumbering those who live no more. Of course, the great novelty of the war was its vast length of front. In France it stretched from the North Sea to the rocky ramparts of Switzerland, 700 kilometres across the fair land of France; and if one counted all the ramifications and convolutions, then 10,000 kilometres represented the sum of this amazing and ceaseless industry which turned soldiers into navvies; moreover, this trench warfare was universal where fighting occurred, and was not special merely to Belgium and France, for it existed in Russia, in Mesopotamia, and the Balkans. A French Army Corps numbers 35,000 men, and, taking the general character of the ground, the parts that can be naturally defended with those that require barricades of barbed wire and other obstacles to reinforce their strength, this Army Corps can hold a line of ten kilometres. Thus 2,000,000 men is about the normal garrison of a line of 500 kilometres. But it must not be supposed that the lines are uniform; they vary considerably. For instance, where the ground is steep and rocky, the defence is rendered easier and the guards of the first trench may be less numerous than in cases where the conditions are more favourable to attack. But such matters are settled by the local commandant, who takes into consideration all the conditions and makes his dispositions accordingly. There are parts of the line where it is not necessary to place men because the parts are enfiladed by cannon, and other places where every mechanical means has been resorted to for strengthening the trenches. The telephone is largely used, and is