square miles of trenches hors de combat, a task that takes millions of shells.  By the time that the first line has been destroyed and the troops have reached the second line, the shells and the men are pretty well used up.  A great successful offensive on the western front is theoretically possible, given millions of men, but practically impossible.  Outside of important local gains, the great western offensives have been failures.  Champagne was a failure, the Calais drive was a failure, Verdun was a failure, and the drive on the Somme has only bent the lines.  The Germans may shorten their lines because of a lack of men, but I firmly believe that neither their line nor the Allies’ line will ever be broken.  What will be the end if the Allies cannot wrest from Germany, Belgium and that part of northern France she is holding for ransom—­to obtain good terms at the peace congress?  Is Germany slowly, very slowly going under, or are we going to witness complete European exhaustion?  Whatever happens, poor, mourning, desolated France will hold to the end.

In localities where no great offensive is contemplated, and the business of violence has become a routine, the object of the commander is to keep the enemy on the qui-vive, demoralize him by killing and wounding his soldiers, and prevent him from strengthening his first lines.  Relations take on the character of an exchange; one day the French throw a thousand mines (high-explosive trench shells) into the German lines, and the next day the Germans throw a thousand back.  The French smash up a village where German troops are en repos; while it is being done, the Germans begin to blow a French village to pieces.  In the trenches the individual soldiers throw grenades at each other, and wish that the whole tiresome business was done with.  They have two weeks in the trenches and two weeks out of them in a cantonment behind the lines.  The period in the trenches is divided between the first lines and the rear lines of the first position.  Often on my way to the trenches at night I would pass a regiment coming to repos.  Silent, vaguely seen, in broken step the regiment passed.  Sometimes a shell would come whistling in.

There was one part of the Bois-le-Pretre region upon which nothing depended, and the war had there settled into the casual exchange of powder and old iron that obtains upon two thirds of the front.  At the entrance to this position, in the shadow of a beautiful clump of ash trees, stood the rustic shelters of the regimental cooks.  From behind the wall of trees came a terrifying crash.  The war-gray, iron field kitchen, which the army slang calls a contre-torpilleur (torpedo-boat destroyer), stood in a little clearing of the wood; there was nothing beautiful to the machine, which was simply an iron box, two feet high and four feet square, mounted on big wheels, and fitted with a high oval chimney.  A halo of kitcheny smell floated about it, and the open door of its fire-box,