Let there be set beside it the great siege-battle of the Aisne, which began on September 15, 1914, and is going on still, with louder thunders and vaster slaughter than ever. Its field has lengthened into a ribbon of contorted trenches stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, a distance of 500 miles, and from, or in, those strange, vast, far-running ditches, now for nearly two years, some 3,000,000 men, the best fighters in history, armed with an artillery which suggests nothing so much as the weapons with which Milton equipped Satan and his hosts in their war with the angels, have been slaying each other. The deep thunder of the guns, the tumult of fighting men, have never ceased to sound at one point or another along those five hundred miles for nearly two years. Verdun, with all its passion and slaughter, its six months’ wrestle of guns and infantry, is a mere episode in this tremendous siege-battle; a score of Waterloos and Marengos have been fought during its progress, and have scarcely found a record. The most brilliant chapter in British military history before the present war was certainly Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsula. They lasted six years. The British forces under Wellington seldom approached, and never exceeded, 50,000 men. Napier condenses the story into a single sentence of stately and resonant prose. In that great struggle the British forces ‘fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or sustained ten sieges, took four great fortresses; killed, wounded, and took 200,000 enemies, etc.;’ and the cost of all this is to be found in ‘the bones of 40,000 British soldiers’ which ‘lie scattered on the plains and mountains of the Peninsula.’ But Sir John French’s army in France lost in three weeks more than Wellington’s armies in the Peninsula lost in six years! In a single episode of the siege-battle beyond the Aisne Valley—say, the second battle of Ypres, which lasted four days—the British employed greater forces, and sustained greater losses, than in Wellington’s six campaigns in the Peninsula.