In the long run, mankind cherishes the reasonable, in faith or action; and, of the barbarous trial of war, this is all that remains in the memory of future ages. The Marne was a signal triumph for Right, won, not by weight of force or by accident, but by superior intelligence and will. That is its essential title to our attention, and its most pregnant meaning for posterity. So immense a trial was it, and a triumph so vitally necessary to civilisation, that all the heroic episodes of our Western history pale before it, to serve henceforth for little, faint, but comprehensible analogies; in the French mind even the _epopée_ of the great Emperor is at last eclipsed. The combatants themselves could not see it thus. Afterwards, the war and those doomed to continue it became sophisticated——governments and the press told them what to expect, and followed them with praise and some care. In this first phase, there is a strange _naïveté_; it is nearly all headlong extemporisation; masses of men constantly plunged from one into another term of the unknown. The “front” was never fixed; there were few of the features of combat later most characteristic——no trenches or dugouts, no bombs or helmets, no poison-gas, no mines, no Stokes guns, no swarm of buzzing ’planes across the sky, no field railways, few hot meals, and fewer ambulance cars. The armies did not come up to their tasks through zones devastated by the enemy, and then reorganised by engineers into so many monstrous war-factories. The forests they crossed were undisturbed, the orchards blossoming, the towns intact. They knew nothing of “camouflage”: on the contrary, they saw and sought the individual foe, and by him were seen individually. Very often, and quickly, they came to bodily grips; commonly, the conflict ceased, or slackened, at sunset. What would afterward have seemed a moderate bombardment terrorised them, for it was worse than anything they had heard of.