"Flags and drums are useless things in warfare. What is the use of a flag which by its bright colors reveals your position, which, as the brown paint on my sabre shows, it has been intended to conceal? In the one case even the slightest reflection of light is guarded against, while in the other a large field of colors undoes all that it has been wished to accomplish. The drummer, on the other hand, must beat his drum as he goes to the attack, yet he is expected to run into the enemy unarmed. He would prefer exchanging his drum for a rifle, so that he would be able to shoot down a soldier. "One feels nothing of the presence of the enemy in battle and on the marches. To be wounded is also not such a bad experience. But you begin to think after the battle. To bear the horrors of war a sort of ideal is necessary. Once, when I took my Slovacs into an attack, we passed a cross by the wayside. Many of them knelt down for a moment and said a prayer. That was sincere and sublime. The ideal which makes it possible for me to bear everything is to be a good officer on the battlefield--under the circumstances my duty toward the social aggregate to which I belong." The Battle of New Year's Day By Perceval Gibbon. [Special Cable to THE NEW YORK TIMES.] ZYRARDOW, Poland, Jan. 3, via London, Jan. 8, (Dispatch to The London Daily Chronicle.)--The lines of trenches, the position of which I am able to observe from here, are those extending south from Sochaczew, and to the west of Msczonow. The chief German efforts are being directed against the centre of this line. They have made a concentration of their best troops opposite our positions west of the village of Guzow, against the trenches of the second army at a point where an army corps of veterans have turned their position into an earthen fortress. Here within the last few days the Germans have brought up guns of all but the largest calibre and generally displayed considerable increases in their artillery. Here also their infantry attacks, those tragic and wasteful assaults in force which send so many thousand German corpses down the streams of the Rawka and Bzura to the Vistula, and so home, are most intense. During the last few days a certain lull in the frequency of these attacks has been observable and has been construed by the Russians as prefatory to renewed endeavors to force the line and advance a short stage on the dangerous road to Warsaw. This premonition was justified on New Year's Day when the enemy's attacks were renewed east of Guzow. The armies are facing each other across their breastworks at a distance varying from 200 to 300 yards. The dawn of 1915, the Germans roused themselves again to the dreary energy of the hopeless battle. I watched the shelling from the headquarters of a regiment which is occupying a trench in the centre of the front line.