ot with extreme care and deliberation, and they
were hard to bring to a decisive finish. The guns were altogether too
predominant. They prevented attacks getting home, and they made it
possible for a timid player to put all his soldiers out of sight behind
hills and houses, and bang away if his opponent showed as much as the
tip of a bayonet. Monsieur Bloch seemed vindicated, and Little War had
become impossible. And there was something a little absurd, too, in the
spectacle of a solitary drummer-boy, for example, marching off with a
gun.

But as there was nevertheless much that seemed to us extremely pretty
and picturesque about the game, we set to work--and here a certain Mr
M. with his brother, Captain M., hot from the Great War in South Africa,
came in most helpfully--to quicken it. Manifestly the guns had to be
reduced to manageable terms. We cut down the number of shots per move to
four, and we required that four men should be within six inches of a gun
for it to be in action at all. Without four men it could neither fire
nor move--it was out of action; and if it moved, the four men had to go
with it. Moreover, to put an end to that little resistant body of men
behind a house, we required that after a gun had been fired it should
remain, without alteration of the elevation, pointing in the direction
of its last shot, and have two men placed one on either side of the end
of its trail. This secured a certain exposure on the part of concealed
and sheltered gunners. It was no longer possible to go on shooting out
of a perfect security for ever. All this favoured the attack and led to
a livelier game.

Our next step was to abolish the tedium due to the elaborate aiming of
the guns, by fixing a time limit for every move. We made this an outside
limit at first, ten minutes, but afterwards we discovered that it made
the game much more warlike to cut the time down to a length that would
barely permit a slow-moving player to fire all his guns and move all his
men. This led to small bodies of men lagging and "getting left," to
careless exposures, to rapid, less accurate shooting, and just that
eventfulness one would expect in the hurry and passion of real fighting.
It also made the game brisker. We have since also made a limit,
sometimes of four minutes, sometimes of five minutes, to the interval
for adjustment and deliberation after one move is finished and before
the next move begins. This further removes the game from th