Now if we were to take the Great War in _years_—1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918 would appear. If we divide it into chapters of more or less equal lengths of time we have a confused, meaningless picture such as is given us by nearly all the popular histories as yet published of that great event. However much these accounts succeed in pleasing each its national audience they fail as histories because they think a month of war must be thirty times more important than a day and need thirty times as much telling. The moment we divide the Great War according to its _military_ values the scheme falls into place and becomes clear. You have three divisions, of which you can make, if you like, three volumes or three chapters. The first is absurdly short in comparison with the length of the whole. It only seriously begins with the great shock of August 20, 21, 1914, in Lorraine and in Flanders, and it ends when the Germans went to earth less than a month later—on the Aisne. From that moment onward the war was a siege. Next you get the second division, the completion of the siege lines in the West to the sea (which is over before the middle of November, two more months), and then the solid three and a half years of effort on the part of the besieged to break out in great sorties and on the part of the besiegers to break down the defence of the besieged. In mere length of time this episode is prodigious and includes all the better known stories of the war. It lasts for over forty-four months and sees the collapse of Russia; the first sorties of the besieged Prussian alliance through Poland; the tremendous efforts made by the Allies to break the enemy’s siege-lines in Champagne, on the Somme, and in Flanders, on the Asiago plateau and on the terrible Carso Plateau in front of Trieste. It sees the failure of the attack on the siege wall at the postern of the Dardanelles, and even in remote Mesopotamia, as well as in the Balkans. It sees further great sorties, especially the violent struggles of the besieged at the end to get out of their net: Caporetto, St. Quentin, the Chemin des Dames. That second division ends on July 15, 1918, when the last effort of the besieged to get out was made against Gouraud and broken by him in front of Rheims. On July 18, 1918, three days later, the third division begins and lasts exactly four months to the Armistice on November 11. It is nothing but the successive breakdown of the defence, the crumbling of the siege wall and the collapse of the besieged. See the Great War on these lines, and you see it clearly, as it was. Try to write of it by successive years, and you get nothing but a fog.