ches In The "Wood Of Death"

So great has been the interest in the purely military side of the
struggle that one is apt to forget that the war is worth study as the
supreme occupation of many great nations, whose every energy, physical,
moral, and economic, has been put to its service, and relentlessly
tested in its fiery furnace. A future historian may find the war more
interesting, when considered as the supreme achievement of the
industrial civilization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, than
as a mere vortex in the age-old ocean of European political strife.
There is something awe-inspiring in the spectacle of all the continuous
and multitudinous activity of a great nation feeding, by a thousand
channels, a thousand rills, to the embattled furrows of the zone of
violence.

By a strange decree of fate, a new warfare has come into being,
admirably adapted to the use and the testing of all our faculties,
organizations, and inventions--trench warfare. The principal element of
this modern warfare is lack of mobility.

The lines advance, the lines retreat, but never once, since the
establishment of the present trench swathe, have the lines of either
combatant been pushed clear out of the normal zone of hostilities. The
fierce, invisible combats are limited to the first-line positions,
averaging a mile each way behind No Man's Land. This stationary
character has made the war a daily battle; it has robbed war of all its
ancient panoply, its cavalry, its uniforms brilliant as the sun, and has
turned it into the national business. I dislike to use the word
"business," with its usual atmosphere of orderly bargaining; I intend
rather to call up an idea more familiar to American minds--the idea of a
great intricate organization with a corporate volition. The war of
to-day is a business, the people are the stockholders, and the object of
the organization is the wisest application of violence to the enemy.

To this end, in numberless secteurs along the front, special
narrow-gauge railroad lines have been built directly from the railroad
station at the edge of the shell zone to the artillery positions. To
this end the trenches have been gathered into a special telephone system
so that General Joffre at Chantilly can talk to any officers or soldiers
anywhere along the great swathe. The food, supplies, clothing, and
ammunition are delivered every day at the gate of the swathe, and calmly
redistributed to the trenches