battle line, stretching out for almost four hundred miles, the fighting
had been terrific. Day after day, week after week, month after month the
terrible struggle had raged incessantly. The losses of all four armies,
German, British, French and Belgian, had been enormous, although, up to
date, it was admitted that the Germans had suffered the worst.

The conflict raged with advantage first to one side and then to the
other. Assaults and counter-assaults were the order of the day. From
Ostend, on the North Sea, now in the hands of the Germans, to the
southern extremity of Alsace-Lorraine, the mighty hosts were locked in a
death grapple; but, in spite of the fearful execution of the weapons of
modern warfare, there had been no really decisive engagement. Neither
side had suffered a severe blow.

In the North the Allies were being given powerful aid by a strong British
fleet, which hurled its shells upon the Germans infesting that region,
thus checking at the same time the threatened advance of the Kaiser's
legions upon Nieuport and Dunkirk, which the Germans planned to use as
naval bases for air raids on England.

The mighty siege and field guns of the Germans--which had been used
with such telling effect upon Liege, Brussels, Antwerp and Ostend,
battering the fortifications there to bits in practically no time at
all--while immense in their power of destruction, were still not a
match for the longer range guns mounted by the British battleships.
Consequently, long-range artillery duels in the north had been all in
favor of British arms.

Terrific charges of the British troops, of whom there were now less than
half a million--Scotch, Irish, Canadians and Indians included--on the
continent, had driven the Germans from Dixmude, Ypres and Armentieres,
captured earlier in the war. Ostend had been shelled by the British
fleet, and a show of force had been made in that vicinity, causing the
Germans to believe that the Allies would attempt to reoccupy this
important seaport.

Farther south the French also had met with some success. From
within striking distance of Paris the invaders had been driven back
to the Marne, and from the Marne to the northern and eastern shores
of the Aisne.

But here the German line held.

The fighting along the Aisne, continuing without cessation, already had
been the bloodiest in the history of wars; and here, the French on one
side of the river, and the Germans on the other, the two great