Tens of thousands of us had disappeared. Thousands took their places nonchalantly. As the opening of the third year approached, there was in the air the wild and brooding sense of the millions of German and Austrian lives and as many of the Allies that had gone out before their time. Earth seemed to stir into consciousness of it. The carnival of Chaos had spread like a wanton dementia. Italy had long since flung aside her sane reserve and plunged into the carnage for the shreds of Austria she desired--Tyrol, Dalmatia, Istria, and Albania. Rumania and Greece had joined with Servia and bound the Balkans into a temporary brotherhood. Together with Russia and Italy at Haskoi they had scattered the crazy Turkish army like chaff and swarmed on to the Bosphorus. The allied fleet drove a withering wedge of steel and fire through the Dardanelles. Constantinople fell. As to a Bacchanal of Blood, the colonies tore out of the map every shred of German colonial territory there was, and poured into Europe their flood of black, white, and yellow men. Little Denmark, catching the festive spirit, reached out for Schleswig-Holstein; and the rest, coveting the Kiel Canal, lent a willing hand to the useful tool. Holland, sore from being the frail buffer between the struggling combatants, placed her interests in the British hands, and opened another gate to the heart of Germany. Russia debouched her million after million upon the East, and though they died dumbly like flies before the German walls of steel at Thorn and Bromberg, they swept the Germans back over the Vistula and out of East Prussia down to the line of the Warthe and Oder. Austria, torn by internal dissension, was ringed in the upper basin of the Danube, where the Tyrol, the Carpathians, and the Germans protected the few shattered loyal ones. There was not a German vessel left on the Seven Seas. Her fleet had been put to sleep in the Frisian marshes, outnumbered by the British on the outside, and cut off from supplies by troops landed through Denmark and Holland. On the West they stood behind the Rhine. The drive had been rapid and relentless from all sides. They left their villages empty except for the dead as they went before the closing ring of steel. They took everything with them that might be used as fuel, as material for ammunition, and left their cities razed more completely than the invader could have done it. Christmas night found us where Ludwigshafen had been. For two months we had stood, unable to move an inch farther. The thick deluge of fire the Germans rolled upon us at every advance amazed us. There could not long be a bit of iron or copper or saltpeter or food left inside the ring.