aults of overwhelming numbers. They thought of
the glories of the Peninsula, of the unbreakable strength of the thin
red line at Waterloo, of the magnificent madness of Balaclava, and
the invincible steadiness and discipline that had made Inkermann a
word to be remembered with pride as long as the English name endured.

Then their thoughts reverted to the immediate past, and they heard
the shock of colossal armaments, compared with which the armies of
the past appeared but pigmies in strength. They saw empires defended
by millions of soldiers crushed in a few weeks, and a wave of
conquest sweep in one unbroken roll from end to end of a continent in
less time than it would have taken Napoleon or Wellington to have
fought a single campaign. Huge fortresses, rendered, as men had
believed, impregnable by the employment of every resource known to
the most advanced military science, had been reduced to heaps of
defenceless ruins in a few hours by a bombardment, under which their
magnificent guns had lain as impotent as though they had been the
culverins of three hundred years ago.

It seemed like some hideous nightmare of the nations, in which Europe
had gone mad, revelling in superhuman bloodshed and destruction,--a
conflict in which more than earthly forces had been let loose,
accomplishing a carnage so immense that the mind could only form a
dim and imperfect conception of it. And now this red tide of
desolation had swept up to the western verge of the Continent, and
was there gathering strength and volume day by day against the hour
when it should burst and oversweep the narrow strip of water which
separated the inviolate fields of England from the blackened and
blood-stained waste that it had left behind it from the Russian
frontier to the German Ocean.

It seemed impossible, and yet it was true. The first line of defence,
the hitherto invincible fleet, magnificently as it had been managed,
and heroically as it had been fought, had failed in the supreme hour
of trial. It had failed, not because the sailors of Britain had done
their duty less valiantly than they had done in the days of Rodney
and Nelson, but simply because the conditions of naval warfare had
been entirely changed, because the personal equation had been almost
eliminated from the problem of battle, and because the new warfare of
the seas had been waged rather with machinery than with men.

In all the war not a single battle had been fought at close qua