iven back or starved into surrender, or broken up and
hunted down. As the superiority of the attack becomes week by week more
and more evident, its assaults will become more dashing and
far-reaching. Under the moonlight and the watching balloons there will
be swift noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and the
never-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part. And now men on
the losing side will thank God for the reprieve of a pitiless wind, for
lightning, thunder, and rain, for any elemental disorder that will for a
moment lift the descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud,
the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and
nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an
elemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces,
blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside the
wisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chance
to get their own again or die.

Such adventures may rescue pride and honour, may cause momentary dismay
in the victor and palliate disaster, but they will not turn back the
advance of the victors, or twist inferiority into victory. Presently the
advance will resume. With that advance the phase of indecisive contest
will have ended, and the second phase of the new war, the business of
forcing submission, will begin. This should be more easy in the future
even than it has proved in the past, in spite of the fact that central
governments are now elusive, and small bodies of rifle-armed guerillas
far more formidable than ever before. It will probably be brought about
in a civilized country by the seizure of the vital apparatus of the
urban regions--the water supply, the generating stations for electricity
(which will supply all the heat and warmth of the land), and the chief
ways used in food distribution. Through these expedients, even while the
formal war is still in progress, an irresistible pressure upon a local
population will be possible, and it will be easy to subjugate or to
create afresh local authorities, who will secure the invader from any
danger of a guerilla warfare upon his rear. Through that sort of an
expedient an even very obdurate loser will be got down to submission,
area by area. With the destruction of its military apparatus and the
prospective loss of its water and food supply, however, the defeated
civilized State will probably be willing to seek terms as a