It is on this side that the pressure of the siege bears most heavily upon her, and that in all probability the breach in her defences will be made. But, as has been ably pointed out in _The Times_ by Colonel Repington, whose military judgment carries more weight in France than that of any other English writer on the war, that breach will only be made by an even and continuous distribution of the pressure exerted along the whole of the western line, simultaneously with a sustained attack on the eastern front. It will not be effected by local offensives, however carefully prepared and however gallantly carried out. The day of brilliant cavalry charges on a grand scale is over. Even combined advances of infantry are a form of tactics that must be used as sparingly as possible, because of the enormous waste of life which under present conditions they necessarily entail. The slight advantage gained by the English last September at Loos and the French in Champagne was far too dearly earned. It was magnificent, but it was not siege tactics, and it is only by acting on the principle that the war, more particularly in the west, is not a series of battles but a siege, that it can be won. The time has come when it must be realized that partial offensives of this kind, carried on over a minute section of the front, are not worth the cost. The advance must be made by continuous sapping, that is to say by hammering away with artillery, and, so far as is possible, with nothing but artillery, along the whole line of the enemy’s trenches at the same time, without giving them any rest or any chance of shifting reinforcements from one part of the line or from one front to another. During the months of comparative stagnation which are now, it may be hoped, drawing to a close, this policy has not been adopted, partly, no doubt, because it could not be. There were not enough guns and not enough high explosive shells. Once or twice they have been massed in huge quantities at some given point, as on those twenty-five miles between Auberives and Massiges in the Champagne country, and they have shown what can be done—provided that too much is not attempted. Our one object is to drive the enemy back. We have to oust them from the ground which they now occupy. That is what is going finally to break the _morale_ of Germany and the German army. We shall never do it, except at a prohibitive cost, as long as in our attacks we sacrifice length to depth. It is far more valuable to us, and far surer and less costly, to gain say one hundred square miles of ground by advancing a quarter of a mile along a front of four hundred miles than to win back the same acreage by pushing the enemy back five miles along a front of twenty.