What I have written of the trenches above will suffice to show, I think, that only the methods of siege warfare--that is, heavy guns and mines--can be used against them with any hope of success. High-explosive shells in unlimited quantities are necessary to keep the hammer pounding away at one given spot. To break a path for our infantry through the weakly held German trenches round Neuve Chapelle we had many scores of guns pouring in a concentrated fire on a front of 1,400 yards for a period of thirty-five minutes. In the operations round Arras the French are said to have fired nearly 800,000 shells in one day. Even this colossal figure was surpassed by the expenditure of high-explosive shells by the German and Austrian armies in their successful thrust against Przemysl. Our bombardment at Neuve Chapelle was, in the main, effective, though barbed-wire entanglements in front of part of the German trenches were not cut, and heavy casualties were thus caused to the infantry when they advanced. For the most part, however, we found the German trenches obliterated, the little village a smoking heap of ruins, and those Germans who survived dazed and frightened amid piles of torn corpses. If this enormous concentration of guns was required to blast a path of 1,400 yards with a thirty-five minute bombardment, what a gigantic concentration of artillery, what a colossal expenditure of ammunition, will be required to drive a wedge several miles deep through positions which the Germans have spent three seasons in strengthening and consolidating! [Illustration: _From “J’ai Vu.”_ THE WAR OF BOMB AND KNIFE: FRENCH SOLDIERS WITH MASKS AND STEEL HELMETS.] I make bold to prophesy (fully aware how dangerous this practice is in military matters) that, when the moment arrives for a resolute offensive in the West, the preliminary bombardment will not be a question of minutes or even of hours, but of _days_ on end, an endless inferno of fire and steel and smoke in which no man will live. For this is a war of extermination. My friend and colleague (if he will allow me to style him thus), “_Eye-Witness_,” remarked in one of his letters from the front on the bizarre circumstance that, during the lulls in the operations, the principal fighting went on in the air and beneath the ground. Sapping, which has played so notable a part in the war of positions, aims at a local effect as contrasted with bombardment, which covers a much wider area. Sapping, however, possesses the prime and obvious advantage that it can go forward without the enemy’s knowledge, whereas anything like a heavy bombardment will always awake the enemy’s suspicions, and enable him to prepare for the attack which he guesses to be impending.