ediately the retreat was begun.

It was a beaten army that plodded back to the line of the Marne. Its
retreat at times narrowly approached a rout. But the army was not
crushed, annihilated. It remained a coherent, serviceable part of
the allied line in the successful action speedily fought along the
Marne. But had it not been for the presence of the airmen the
British expeditionary force would have been wiped out then and
there.

The battle of Mons gave the soldiers a legend which still
persists--that of the ghostly English bowmen of the time of Edward
the Black Prince who came back from their graves to save that field
for England and for France. Thousands of simple souls believe that
legend to-day. But it is no whit more unbelievable than the story of
an army saved by a handful of men flying thousands of feet above the
field would have been had it been told of a battle in our Civil War.
The world has believed in ghosts for centuries and the Archers of
Mons are the legitimate successors of the Great Twin Brethren at the
Battle of Lake Regillus. But Caesar, Napoleon, perhaps the elder von
Moltke himself would have scoffed at the idea that men could turn
themselves into birds to spy out the enemy's dispositions and save a
sorely menaced army.

When this war has passed into history it will be recognized that its
greatest contributions to military science have been the development
and the use of aircraft and submarines. There have, of course, been
other features in the method of waging war which have been novel
either in themselves, or in the gigantic scale upon which they have
been employed. There is, for example, nothing new about trench
warfare. The American who desires to satisfy himself about that need
only to visit the Military Park at Vicksburg, or the country about
Petersburg or Richmond, to recognize that even fifty years ago our
soldiers understood the art of sheltering themselves from bullet and
shrapnel in the bosom of Mother Earth. The trench warfare in
Flanders, the Argonne, and around Verdun has been novel only in the
degree to which it has been developed and perfected. Concrete-lined
trenches, with spacious and well-furnished bomb-proofs, with
phonographs, printing presses, and occasional dramatic performances
for lightening the soldiers' lot present an impressive elaboration
of the muddy ditches of Virginia and Mississippi. Yet after all the
boys of Grant and Lee had the essentials of trench warfare wel