And the end is sure. The German garrison, for all their brave deeds and all the brave words of their Xenophon, are obviously getting downhearted. When you have spent a few hours in the trenches, with your head always below the level of the ground, with nothing above you but the sky and nothing in front of you or behind you but endless lines of mud or chalk, like the earth thrown up by the side of a newly-made grave, you can understand the wonderful descriptive truth of those four words, “That is their horizon.” To live for days and nights at a time—to live for long months with scanty intervals of cave-dwelling in holes scooped out in the sides of hills—down there in the newly made grave, on a floor of mud between walls of mud, with tiny loopholes for your only windows, through which you see a narrow segment of the landscape (always with another mud-bank in front of you) between the stalks of the grasses, with your eye on a level with their roots—that, quite apart from the question of shells and fighting, has been the life and the outlook of our men and the French soldiers at the front, ever since they began fifteen weary months ago to be a besieging force. But, as I have tried to show earlier in this book, the French do not think about their life as this German and his compatriots in the trenches obviously do—for the simple but all-sufficient reason that they are the besiegers and not the besieged. For the French and the English, though for them, too, “that is their horizon,” can see beyond it, not perhaps the Angles of Mons, but decidedly the Angel of Victory. CHAPTER XX SIEGE WARFARE The kind of modern siege in which the Allies are engaged, unlike the bombardment of a modern fortress, but like the sieges of old times, is bound to be a protracted affair. Still it is not likely that Germany will hold out as long as Troy did. From her geographical position, nearly surrounded by the host of enemies that her arrogance and self-seeking have arrayed against her, she was bound sooner or later to be the besieged party, unless she succeeded in crushing one or more of them by her first impetuous rush. It was not enough to drive them back. She had to annihilate them or at least to bring them to terms at the outset, and that she failed to do. Now, for the time being, she has created troublesome diversions in the Balkans and other parts of the world outside the main field of action, and has even opened a sally-port in the direction of Constantinople. But everywhere else her exits, and to a certain extent her entrances, are barred, north and south by the fleets of the Allies and the hitherto no-man’s land of two neutral states, on the east by the armies of Russia, and on the west by lines of trenches every bit as strong as her own.