In that spirit the French nation and the armies of the east settled down to the second period of the war—the struggle of the trenches. It was not so picturesque as what had gone before, not so pregnant with possibilities of thrilling victories or saddening but stimulating defeats, not so anxious, not so inspiring. It was utterly foreign to the genius of the French soldier. Morning after morning the official communiqués hardly ever varied. _Rien de nouveau sur le front occidental._ And yet, though there was nothing new there was always the same thing—always suffering and exposure and wounds and death, and always fresh names added to the roll of honour. And sometimes, though one never knew any of the glorious details till even the men who had taken part in them had almost forgotten about them, there were more decided efforts to make headway and bloodier encounters than the minor struggles to gain a hundred yards of trench, wasting and deadly as that daily routine was bound to be. When the historians get to work they will give us, I suppose, a real record of all this trench warfare. They will tell us how the different battalions and regiments fared on different parts of the line, how one charged brilliantly across fifty yards of open ground and barbed wire and drove the enemy out of the opposite trench, only to be enfiladed by a murderous fire of mitrailleuses and forced to retire to their old trench, leaving half their men behind them, and all for nothing. They will tell of how another repelled a night attack with such gallantry and vigour that they drove the enemy helter-skelter before them and occupied after half an hour’s work a position which they had been sitting in front of for months, harassed all the time by the daily wastage caused by snipers, gas attacks, hand-grenades, bombs of all kinds, trench mortars, Minenwerfers, and all the other improved prehistoric death-dealing devices which have sprung into being from the mud and chalk and solid rock of the trenches. Then we shall know the names of the gallant living and the gallant dead, and many other details of intense interest which at present it is impossible to know and still more to realize.