Horace, off duty for a few hours from his post as military telephonist, for which he had fitted himself to qualify when his work as a motor cyclist was done, looked at the smitten world. He tried to compare the war before him with the war to which for one brief, wild month he had been so close. There was no comparison. To nothing that the world has ever seen could the War of the Trenches be compared. It was a cold, invisible inferno, which, every morning and evening, spewed up its ghastly tale of dead and wounded; which, every evening and morning, yielded up its line of staggering, weary, war-dulled figures, glad to exchange the peril of death for the miserable existence which was all that was possible behind the trenches in the plain of Champagne that first fearful winter. The war of men was over, only a war of murderous moles remained. In a rickety hovel behind the lines, which, as Horace's companion in the telephone work declared, was "weather-proof only when there wasn't any weather to put it to the proof," the boy had puzzled over this new warfare. At last, one day, the opportunity serving, he hunted up his friend the veteran--now a sergeant-major--and learned the causes and the methods of the ditch-born strife. [Illustration: _Courtesy of "Le Miroir."_ THE VALLEY OF THE DEAD. Bombardment of shrapnel and high explosive shell, forming a barrage fire through which the men seen in the trench are about to plunge.] "Modern fighting," said the veteran, as he cleaned his rifle, a daily task in that rust-devouring atmosphere, "is the result of modern weapons. Whereas a musket would take two minutes to load and had a range of only a couple of hundred yards, a modern rifle will fire thirty shots a minute and over, and has a good killing range at an almost flat trajectory of a thousand yards. Suppose it takes a charging force of infantry six minutes to run a thousand yards, where a musket would get in three shots a modern rifle would put in from 180 to 300 shots, and would be firing almost continuously." "Men would have to be under cover to face that fire," agreed Horace. "More murderous than the rifle," the veteran continued, "is the machine-gun, which fires 600 shots a minute and can be operated by two men. It is estimated as being equal to fifty men, but, in reality, its destructiveness in the hands of a good gunner is far higher. It's easy to handle, too, the Maxims weighing sixty pounds and our Hotchkiss fifty-three pounds, because the English weapon is water-cooled and ours is air-cooled." "Which is best?" "Ours," replied the veteran promptly, "because a Maxim, when it's firing steadily, gets so hot that it boils the water and the enemy can see the steam. Then he knows where you are and concentrates his fire and--you tuck in your toes and no one will ever wake you up." "Invisibility counts," said the boy.