Wars serve as convenient mileposts in the history of mankind. They deal with the great struggles which break up the monotony of peace and bring the nations into volcanic relations. They have been many and their causes and effects various; strifes for spoil or dominion; savage invasions of civilized lands; overflow of vast areas by conquering tribes or nations. But among all the world has so far known there has been none so stupendous in character, so portentous in purpose, so vast in fighting multitudes, so terrible in bloodshed, as the one with which we are here concerned, the lurid meeting of the nations on the blood-stained fields of battle which broke upon the quiet of the world with startling suddenness in the summer of 1914. Launched on the borders of little Servia, it soon had the continent for its field of action, and all but one of the greater nations of Europe for its participants. It may therefore fitly be designated the Great War. Great it was, alike in the number and strength of the Powers involved, in the enormous array of armed men engaged, in the destructive power of the weapons employed, in the loss of life and waste of wealth that attended its earthquaking development. In reading the history of the past we find it thickly strewn with stories of fierce battles, a day, two days, rarely much longer in extent, protracted intervals of marching and countermarching succeeding before the armies again locked horns. Such was the case in the American Civil War, in which the three days’ battle at Gettysburg was the greatest in length, if the six days’ fighting before Richmond be taken to constitute a succession of battles. In the Russo-Japanese war much longer struggles took place. The armies at Liaoyung fought for eight days and those before Mukden for twenty days. But a more obstinate struggle still was that of September and October, 1914, when two armies, stretched out over a line two hundred miles or more in length, fought with ceaseless fury, by day and night alike, for more than a month. On the moving picture screen of time this vast conflict stands out without parallel in the world’s annals, the most unyielding, incessant battling ever known. A CONTINENT IN ARMS In the giant warfare here described we behold a continent, well nigh a world, in arms. Along the rivers north of Paris three powerful nations, Germany, France and Britain, wrestled like mighty behemoths for supremacy. Far eastward, on the borders of Russia, Austria and Germany, two other great Powers, Russia and Austria, with German armies to aid the latter, strove with equal fury for victory.