Three epochs of war meet in the war of positions. We have returned to methods and weapons of war which in our proud ignorance we thought to have discarded from our military experience for ever. The short broad knife of the primitive savage, the bomb and sap of the soldiers of Wellington, the machine-gun and heavy howitzer of the scientific inventor of the twentieth century, are the weapons of this war, a combination of brute force and man-slaying machinery which is surely a crowning dishonour to our civilization. In this siege warfare the magazine-rifle, which we believed to be the last word in military progress, has fallen from its place. High explosive, either in giant shells hurled from enormously powerful guns or concealed in mines in the bowels of the earth, to shatter the enemy in his skilfully contrived positions, the bomb and knife for the infantry who sweep forward to complete his discomfiture cowering in his battered trench, the automatic rifle and machine-gun to mow down survivors still holding out in their redoubts, with machine-guns playing on the captured position--these are _die Forderung des Tages_, the demand of the moment, in a phrase of Prince Bülow’s which was once a political catchword in Germany. This siege warfare is a war of force against force, the force of machinery dealing ponderous, mighty blows against a wall of steel, smashing, smashing, smashing, always in the same place, until the line is bent, then broken, then the force of man coming into play in a wild onrush of storming infantry, with their primitive passions aflame, surging forward amid clouds of green and yellow and red smoke, bombing and slashing their way through the breach their machines have made. Not the strategist but the engineer is trumps in this warfare, this Armageddon in which, for all our vaunted civilization, we have returned to the darkness of the Dawn of Time.