GY

In innumerable volumes future generations will learn the details of
this war: and the discussions among delving historians will never
end. For our time a simpler task is the service set for us. We
require a record of the essential facts of the struggle arranged
with a sense of historical perspective.

For forty years the great nations of Europe had had universal
service. Every able-bodied youth, unless his government chose to
excuse him, became a soldier. For forty years the diplomatists had
held the balance of power so delicately poised that the mighty armed
forces all kept to their own sides of their frontiers. It was in the
era of modern invention and man's mastery of material power that
these great armies were formed and trained for the war that was to
test their steel.

Where Napoleon marched a hundred thousand men along parallel roads,
the modern general sends his millions on railroad trains. The
problem for each nation when war came was to concentrate with a
greater rapidity than its adversary its enormous masses of men and
guns against the enemy; and success in this was not due as in former
days to speed of foot over good highways such as the Romans and
Napoleon built, but to organized railroad and automobile transport
or rather the prompt employment of all the industrial resources of
the nation for war alone.

Out of the conflicting reports day by day emerge to the observer as
he reviews the progress of the war, with the map before him, plans
of campaign as simple in their broad lines as in Caesar's or
Alexander's day. Generals fighting with a million or two million men
under their command have held to the same principles as if they had
only ten or fifteen thousand.

All schools of successful warfare have believed in the offensive; in
quick decisive blows which take the enemy by surprise and find him
unready if possible. They hold that the army in rest must always be
beaten by the army which takes the initiative. This partly explains
the frequent small actions indicated by the reports of trenches
taken in assault along the western front, while the lines occupied
by the armies did not radically change. Such actions are the natural
expression by any spirited force of its sense of initiative. Unless
you sometimes take some of the enemy's trenches, he will be taking
yours. By striking him in one section you may prevent him from
striking you in another. Von Moltke and the other great German
generals we