What, indeed, is modern warfare in its highest phases but this? Is it not altogether out of date and ignorant to picture soldiering as riding about on horseback, bivouacking in forests, sleeping in tents, and dashing gallantly at the head of shining regiments in plumes and breastplates, and pounding in serried ranks against the equally serried ranks of the cruel foe, storming breaches as the "war," in short, of Mr. Henty's books for boys? How far does such a conception correspond to the reality--to the German conception? Even if the whole picture were not out of date, what proportion of the most military nation would ever be destined to witness it or to take part in it? Not one in ten thousand. What is the character even of military conflict but, for the most part, years of hard and steady work, somewhat mechanical, somewhat divorced from real life, but not a whit more exciting? That is true of all ranks; and in the higher ranks of the directing mind war has become an almost purely intellectual process. Was it not the late W.H. Steevens who painted Lord Kitchener as the sort of man who would have made an admirable manager of Harrod's Stores; who fought all his battles in his study, and regarded the actual fighting as the mere culminating incident in the whole process, the dirty and noisy part of it, which he would have been glad to get away from? The real soldiers of our time--those who represent the brain of the armies--have a life not very different from that of men of any intellectual calling; much less of physical strife than is called for in many civil occupations; less than falls to the lot of engineers, ranchers, sailors, miners, and so on. Even with armies the pugnacity must be translated into intellectual and not into physical effort.[95] The very fact that war was long an activity which was in some sense a change and relaxation from the more intellectual strife of peaceful life, in which work was replaced by danger, thought by adventure, accounted in no small part for its attraction for men. But, as we have seen, war is becoming as hopelessly intellectual and scientific as any other form of work: officers are scientists, the men are workmen, the army is a machine, battles are "tactical operations," the charge is becoming out of date; a little while and war will become the least romantic of all professions.