his earthen
barrier. We shall win this war one day, and most of the credit will
go, as usual, to those who are in at the finish. But--when we assign
the glory and the praise, let us not forget those who stood up to the
first rush. The new armies which are pouring across the Channel this
month will bring us victory in the end. Let us bare our heads,
then, in all reverence, to the memory of those battered, decimated,
indomitable legions which saved us from utter extinction at the
beginning.)

The situation appears to be that if we get through--and no one seems
to doubt that we shall: the difficulty lies in staying there when you
have got through--we shall be committed at once to an endless campaign
of village-fighting. This country is as flat as Cambridgeshire.
Every yard of it is under cultivation. The landscape is dotted with
farm-steadings. There is a group of cottages or an _estaminet_ at
every cross-roads. When our great invading line sweeps forward,
each one of these buildings will be held by the enemy, and must be
captured, house by house, room by room, and used as a base for another
rush.

And how is this to be done?

Well, it will be no military secret by the time these lines appear. It
is no secret now. The answer to the conundrum is--Bombs!

To-day, out here, bombs are absolutely _dernier cri_. We talk of
nothing else. We speak about rifles and bayonets as if they were so
many bows and arrows. It is true that the modern Lee-Enfield and
Mauser claim to be the most precise and deadly weapons of destruction
ever devised. But they were intended for proper, gentlemanly warfare,
with the opposing sides set out in straight lines, a convenient
distance apart. In the hand-to-hand butchery which calls itself war
to-day, the rifle is rapidly becoming _demode_. For long ranges you
require machine-guns; for short, bombs and hand-grenades. Can you
empty a cottage by firing a single rifle-shot in at the door? Can you
exterminate twenty Germans in a fortified back-parlour by a single
thrust with a bayonet? Never! But you can do both these things with a
jam-tin stuffed with dynamite and scrap-iron.

So the bomb has come to its own, and has brought with it certain
changes--tactical, organic, and domestic. To take the last first,
the bomb-officer, hitherto a despised underling, popularly (but
maliciously) reputed to have been appointed to his present post
through inability to handle a platoon, has suddenly attained a
pos