he numbers and manhood of
the two forces, these screens would speedily become simply very
attenuated lines.

[38] So far, pestilence has been a feature of almost every sustained war
in the world, but there is really no reason whatever why it should be
so. There is no reason, indeed, why a soldier upon active service on the
victorious side should go without a night's rest or miss a meal. If he
does, there is muddle and want of foresight somewhere, and that our
hypothesis excludes.

[39] Lady Maud Rolleston, in her very interesting _Yeoman Service_,
complains of the Boers killing an engine-driver during an attack on a
train at Kroonstadt, "which was," she writes, "an abominable action, as
he is, in law, a non-combatant." The implicit assumption of this
complaint would cover the engineers of an ironclad or the guides of a
night attack, everybody, in fact, who was not positively weapon in hand.

[40] Experiments will probably be made in the direction of armoured
guns, armoured search-light carriages, and armoured shelters for men,
that will admit of being pushed forward over rifle-swept ground. To such
possibilities, to possibilities even of a sort of land ironclad, my
inductive reason inclines; the armoured train seems indeed a distinct
beginning of this sort of thing, but my imagination proffers nothing but
a vision of wheels smashed by shells, iron tortoises gallantly rushed by
hidden men, and unhappy marksmen and engineers being shot at as they
bolt from some such monster overset. The fact of it is, I detest and
fear these thick, slow, essentially defensive methods, either for land
or sea fighting. I believe invincibly that the side that can go fastest
and hit hardest will always win, with or without or in spite of massive
defences, and no ingenuity in devising the massive defence will shake
that belief.

[41] Or, in deference to the Rules of War, fire them out of guns of
trivial carrying power.

[42] A curious result might very possibly follow a success of submarines
on the part of a naval power finally found to be weaker and defeated.
The victorious power might decide that a narrow sea was no longer, under
the new conditions, a comfortable boundary line, and might insist on
marking its boundary along the high-water mark of its adversary's
adjacent coasts.

[43] There comes to hand as I correct these proofs a very typical
illustration of the atmosphere of really almost imbecile patronage in
which the British pr