lts; but it would be almost as idle
now to give the details of every encounter that occurred, as to describe
the besieging of a snow-fort by schoolboys.

It is impossible not to reflect that a couple of Parrots and a Monitor or
two would have terminated the siege in half an hour in favor of either
party, and levelled the town or the besiegers' works as if they had been
of pasteboard.

Bucquoy's dyke was within a thousand yards of the harbour's entrance, yet
the guns on his platform never sank a ship nor killed a man on board,
while the archduke's batteries were even nearer their mark. Yet it was
the most prodigious siege of modern days. Fifty great guns were in
position around the place, and their balls weighed from ten to forty
pounds apiece. It was generally agreed that no such artillery practice
had ever occurred before in the world.

For the first six months, and generally throughout the siege, there was
fired on an average a thousand of such shots a day. In the sieges of the
American civil war there were sometimes three thousand shots an hour, and
from guns compared to which in calibre and power those cannon and
demi-cannon were but children's toys.

Certainly the human arm was of the same length then as now, a pike-thrust
was as effective as the stab of the most improved bayonet, and when it
came, as it was always the purpose to do, to the close embrace of foemen,
the work was done as thoroughly as it could be in this second half of the
nineteenth century.

Nevertheless it is impossible not to hope that such progress in science
must at last render long wars impossible. The Dutch war of independence
had already lasted nearly forty years. Had the civil war in America upon
the territory of half a continent been waged with the Ostend machinery it
might have lasted two centuries. Something then may have been gained for
humanity by giving war such preter-human attributes as to make its
demands of gold and blood too exhaustive to become chronic.

Yet the loss of human life during that summer and winter was sufficiently
wholesale as compared with the meagre results. Blood flowed in torrents,
for no man could be more free of his soldiers' lives than was the
cardinal-archduke, hurling them as he did on the enemy's works before the
pretence of a practical breach had been effected, and before a reasonable
chance existed of purchasing an advantage at such a price. Five hundred
were killed outright in half-an-hour's assau