Lord Cavan, who for many months commanded the famous Guards Brigade in the war, told me of an Irish Guardsman who killed a dozen or so of Germans with a spade. The Irishman was going up a narrow communication trench when a German rushed out round a traverse. The Guardsman shot him with the last cartridge in his magazine. He was so cramped for space that he did not know whether he could spare time to load again, as he knew that other Germans were behind the first. So, quick as thought, he called to a comrade who was working on the parapet of the trench above him. “Show us your spade here, Mike!” The other handed down his spade just as a second German came round the traverse. The Guardsman promptly felled him with a blow that would have killed an ox, and went on “slipping it across them” (as he would have said himself) as fast as they emerged. I believe that in this way he actually accounted for ten or more Germans. The rifle and bayonet will play their part again when the time comes for an advance over a broad front. For the rush through a narrow breach the knife and bomb are the weapons. Siege warfare will not be the last word in this war. Opinions vary, but for me there will be no peace of the kind that will banish the German peril for generations to come unless the German lines can be broken and the enemy hurled back in disorder from the North of France far back into Belgium, and maybe beyond. Once the German line is pierced, if only the breach be wide and deep enough, we return to the _Bewegungskrieg_, which is the only kind of fighting in this war for which both sides have a standard of comparison in previous campaigns, and for which consequently the Germans are better equipped than the Allies. The weapon of the _Bewegungskrieg_, as we learnt in the fighting at the outset of the war, and of the _Stellungskrieg_ as well, as often as the armies have “got moving,” is undoubtedly the machine-gun. The machine-gun, or, generally speaking, the automatic gun that fires several hundred shots a minute, is, I believe, the principal contribution which this war is destined to make to military science. Just as the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 introduced the needle-gun, and the Franco-Prussian War the _chassepot_ rifle, and the South African War was the war of the magazine-rifle, so the present war will be known as the war of the automatic gun. When the German General Staff sits down to write its official history of the Great War, it will be able to attribute the greater part of the success that German arms may have achieved to its foresight in accumulating an immense stock of machine-guns, and in studying the whole theory and tactics of this comparatively new weapon before any other army in the world became alive to its paramount importance.