negligible
factor.

British and French cavalry were active in pursuit of the fleeing Teutons
when the Hindenburg line was smashed in September of 1918. Outside of
that brief episode, the cavalry did comparatively nothing so far as the
Allies were concerned. It was the practice on both sides to dismount
cavalry and convert it into some form of trench service. Trench mortar
companies, bombing squads, and other specialty groups were organized
from among the cavalrymen. Of course the fighting in the open stretches
of Mesopotamia, South Africa and Russia involved the use of great bodies
of cavalry. The trend of modern warfare, however, is to equip the
cavalryman with grenades and bayonets, in addition to his ordinary gear,
and to make of him practically a mounted infantryman.

Trench warfare occupied most of the time and made nine-tenths of the
discomforts of the soldiers of both armies. If proof of the adaptive
capacity of the human animal were needed, it is afforded by the manner
in which the men burrowed in vermin-infested earth and lived there under
conditions of Arctic cold, frequently enduring long deprivations of
food, fuel, and suitable clothing. During the early stages of the war,
before men became accustomed to the rigors of the trenches, many
thousands died as a direct result of the exposure. Many thousand of
others were incapacitated for life by "trench feet," a group of maladies
covering the consequences of exposure to cold and water which in those
early days flowed in rivulets through most of the trenches. The trenches
at Gallipoli had their own special brand of maladies. Heatstroke and a
malarial infection were among these disabling agencies. Trench fever, a
malady beginning with a headache and sometimes ending in partial
paralysis and death, was another common factor in the mortality records.

But in spite of all these and other discomforts, in spite of the
disgusting vermin that crawled upon the men both in winter and in
summer, both sides mastered the trenches and in the end learned to live
in them with some degree of comfort.

At first the trenches were comparatively straight, shallow affairs; then
as the artillery searched them out, as the machine gunners learned the
art of looping their fire so that the bullets would drop into the hiding
places of the enemy, the trench systems gradually became more
scientifically involved. After the Germans had been beaten at the Marne
and had retired to their pre