able to prepare for an offensive elsewhere. He spared the material and the guns to coöperate with the British on the Somme and later he sent to General Foch, commander of the northern group of French Armies, the unsurpassed Iron Corps from Nancy and the famous Colonial Corps.

It was in March, 1916, when suspense about Verdun was at its height, that Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the group of British Armies, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was to be his right-hand man through the offensive as commander of the Fourth Army, went over the ground opposite the British front on the Somme and laid the plans for their attack, and Sir Henry received instructions to begin the elaborate preparations for what was to become the greatest battle of all time. It included, as the first step, the building of many miles of railway and highway for the transport of the enormous requisite quantities of guns and materials.

The Somme winds through rich alluvial lands at this point and around a number of verdant islands in its leisurely course. Southward, along the old front line, the land is more level, where the river makes its bend in front of Péronne. Northward, generically, it rises into a region of rolling country, with an irregularly marked ridge line which the Germans held.

No part of the British front had been so quiet in the summer of 1915 as the region of Picardy. From the hill where later I watched the attack of July 1st, on one day in August of the previous year I had such a broad view that if a shell were to explode anywhere along the front of five miles it would have been visible to me, and I saw not a single burst of smoke from high explosive or shrapnel. Apparently the Germans never expected to undertake any offensive here. All their energy was devoted to defensive preparations, without even an occasional attack over a few hundred yards to keep in their hand. Tranquillity, which amounted to the simulation of a truce, was the result. At different points you might see Germans walking about in the open and the observer could stand exposed within easy range of the guns without being sniped at by artillery, as he would have been in the Ypres salient.

When the British took over this section of line, so short were they of guns that they had to depend partly on French artillery; and their troops were raw New Army battalions or regulars stiffened by a small percentage of veterans of Mons and Ypres. The want of guns and shells required correspondingly more troops to the mile, which left them still relying on flesh and blood rather than on machinery for defense. The British Army was in that middle stage of a few highly trained troops and the first arrival of the immense forces to come; while the Germans occupied on the Eastern front were not of a mind to force the issue. There is a story of how one day a German battery, to vary the monotony, began shelling a British trench somewhat heavily. The British, in reply, put up a sign, "If you don't stop we will fire our only rifle grenade at you!" to which the Germans replied in the same vein, "Sorry! We will stop"—as they did.

The subsoil of the hills is chalk, which yields to the pick rather easily and makes firm walls for trenches. Having chosen their position, which they were able to do in the operations after the Marne as the two armies, swaying back and forth in the battle for positions northward, came to rest, the Germans had set out, as the result of experience, to build impregnable works in the days when forts had become less important and the trench had become supreme. As holding the line required little fighting, the industrious Germans under the stiff bonds of discipline had plenty of time for sinking deep dugouts and connecting galleries under their first line and for elaborating their communication trenches and second line, until what had once been peaceful farming land now consisted of irregular welts of white chalk crossing fields without hedges or fences, whose sweep had been broken only by an occasional group of farm buildings of a large proprietor, a plot of woods, or the village communities where the farmers lived and went to and from their farms which were demarked to the eye only by the crop lines.

One can never make the mistake of too much simplification in the complicated detail of modern tactics where the difficulty is always to see the forest for the trees. Strategy has not changed since prehistoric days. It must always remain the same: feint and surprise. The first primitive man who looked at the breast of his opponent and struck suddenly at his face was a strategist; so, too, the anthropoid at the Zoo who leads another to make a leap for a trapeze and draws it out from under him; so, too, the thug who waits to catch his victim coming unawares out of an alley. Anybody facing more than one opponent will try to protect his back by a wall, which is also strategy—strategy being the veritable instinct of self-preservation which aims at an advantage in the disposition of forces.

Place two lines of fifty men facing each other in the open without officers, and some fellow with initiative on the right or the left end will instinctively give the word and lead a rush for cover somewhere on the flank which will permit an enfilade of the enemy's ranks. Practically all of the great battles of the world have been won by turning an enemy's flank, which compelled him to retreat if it did not result in rout or capture.

The swift march of a division or a brigade from reserve to the flank at the critical moment has often turned the fortune of a day. All manoeuvering has this object in view. Superior numbers facilitate the operation, and victory has most often resolved itself into superior numbers pressing a flank and nothing more; though subsequently his admiring countrymen acclaimed the victor as the inventor of a strategic plan which was old before Alexander took the field, when the victor's genius consisted in the use of opportunities that enabled him to strike at the critical point with more men than his adversary. In flank of the Southern Confederacy Sherman swung through the South; in flank the Confederates aimed to bend back the Federal line at Kulp's Hill and Little Round Top. By the flank Grant pressed Lee back to Appomattox. Yalu, Liao Yang and Mukden were won in the Russo-Japanese war by flanking movements which forced Kuropatkin to retire, though never disastrously.

Pickett's charge at Gettysburg remains to the American the most futile and glorious illustration of a charge against a frontal position, with its endeavor to break the center. The center may waver, but it is the flanks that go; though, of course, in all consistent operations of big armies a necessary incident of any effort to press back the wings is sufficient pressure on the front, simultaneously delivered, to hold all the troops there in position and keep the enemy command in apprehension of the disaster that must follow if the center were to break badly at the same time that his flanks were being doubled back. The foregoing is only the repetition of principles which cannot be changed by the length of line and masses of troops and incredible volumes of artillery fire; which makes the European war the more confusing to the average reader as he receives his information in technical terms.

The same object that leads one line of men to try to flank another sent the German Army through Belgium in order to strike the French Army in flank. It succeeded in this purpose, but not in turning the French flank; though by this operation, in violation of the territory of a neutral nation, it made enemy territory the scene of future action. One may discuss until he is blue in the face what would have happened if the Germans had thrown their legions directly against the old French frontier. Personally, in keeping with the idea that I expressed in "The Last Shot," I think that they would never have gone through the Trouée de Miracourt or past Verdun.

With a solid line of trenches from Switzerland to the North Sea, any offensive must "break the center," as it