egiments
were organized into fifteen divisions. Each group of three divisions was
wired to a general, and the five generals were wired to the great Oyama
himself, who sat ten miles back of the firing-line and sent his orders.
Whenever a regiment lunged forward, one of the soldiers carried a
telephone set. If they held their position, two other soldiers ran
forward with a spool of wire. In this way and under fire of the Russian
cannon, one hundred and fifty miles of wire were strung across the
battlefield. As the Japanese said, it was this "flying telephone" that
enabled Oyama to manipulate his forces as handily as though he were
playing a game of chess. It was in this war, too, that the Mikado's
soldiers strung the costliest of all telephone lines, at 203 Metre Hill.
When the wire had been basted up this hill to the summit, the fortress
of Port Arthur lay at their mercy. But the climb had cost them
twenty-four thousand lives.

Of the seven million telephones in the United States, about two million
are now in farmhouses. Every fourth American farmer is in telephone
touch with his neighbors and the market. Iowa leads, among the farming
States. In Iowa, not to have a telephone is to belong to what a Londoner
would call the "submerged tenth" of the population. Second in line comes
Illinois, with Kansas, Nebraska, and Indiana following closely behind;
and at the foot of the list, in the matter of farm telephones, are
Connecticut and Louisiana.

The first farmer who discovered the value of the telephone was
the market gardener. Next came the bonanza farmer of the Red River
Valley--such a man, for instance, as Oliver Dalrymple, of North Dakota,
who found that by the aid of the telephone he could plant and harvest
thirty thousand acres of wheat in a single season. Then, not more than
half a dozen years ago, there arose a veritable Telephone Crusade among
the farmers of the Middle West. Cheap telephones, yet fairly good,
had by this time been made possible by the improvements of the Bell
engineers; and stories of what could be done by telephone became the
favorite gossip of the day. One farmer had kept his barn from being
burned down by telephoning for his neighbors; another had cleared five
hundred dollars extra profit on the sale of his cattle, by telephoning
to the best market; a third had rescued a flock of sheep by sending
quick news of an approaching blizzard; a fourth had saved his son's life
by getting an instantaneous