Paris or Petrograd in the hands of the Germans might mean such a decision. Certainly, should the western front be broken by either side, it would be the most telling blow of the war in both the moral and the military sense. But after all, was the line of least resistance for Germany the line of the western front? Would she really strike her great blow of 1916—if she still had the power to strike one—against the western rather than the eastern front? Hitherto, attacks had succeeded against Russia.

It was in Russia that she had had her success. German officers had always stated their confidence that with their superior gun fire and tactics they could always force the Russians back. Could they press back the French and the British?

When would the war end? seemed as unanswerable to the lay observer in the spring of 1916 as in the spring of 1915. How long was the fearful attrition to go on? Could either side ever strike a decisive blow, or would the eventual result be a bloody stalemate, with England still in command of the sea?

The significant generic lesson of the war is not in the power of artillery, but the power of all material organization, when nations set out to gain their ends by force: its military lesson was that both sides had pretty well followed sound policy considering the situation, despite armchair critics who knew nothing of inside facts.

Europe was spending $100,000,000 or more a day in the business of destruction—of life and of property. A broad belt of ruins spread across France and Belgium for 450 miles; a broader one of 1,000 miles across Galicia and Russia. No nation engaged could be said to be victorious except the Japanese. Japan had gained Kiao-chau; strengthened her influence in China enormously, and was making immense profits by working her arsenals and every plant at full speed making munitions for Russia.

The United States at peace, preparing to make munitions as fast as she could, and able to produce only 3,000 rifles a week for the Allies on the 1st of December, 1915, and 5,000 a week March 1, 1916, was enjoying an era of "boom" prosperity, thanks to the eager market of nations whose own production was arrested while their workers were at war. From the gloom of London and Paris, where men and women had given up all luxuries, the transatlantic voyage brought you to New York, which was the only gay capital in the world, enjoying all the privileges of extravagance when money is plentiful.

WAR BY MACHINERY

This has been a war of machinery; but the old rule has been true that development in any weapon of offense has been countered by further development of means of defense. Nor is the theoretical power of weapons ever equaled by their actual power when the test of war comes. With self-preservation remaining the first law of nature, man is in nothing so skillful as in avoiding the enemy's blows.

When one watches a 15-inch gun fired and hears its 2,000-pound shell go screaming through the air, his concept of its destructive action is exaggerated by imagination, and further confirmed if he sees that shell burst inside a house, reducing its interior to wreckage. But the shell may not hit the house; it may fall in an open field and merely make a crater in the earth. Besides, someone must be in the house when it is hit if there are to be any casualties; and it is quite possible that a single person present might be dug out of the debris unharmed. Vulnerable as man's flesh is, he remains a pretty small object on the landscape. If he knows that his house is in danger of being struck he then either goes into the cellar at the first alarm, after having covered his floor with sandbags, or he may take to a dugout in his yard.

When one has seen ten 15-inch shells strike a town of 25,000 inhabitants in a busy hour of the day and only half a dozen persons killed and injured, he may learn a contempt for shell fire which, however, is promptly turned into a tragic respect when one of the same sort of shells strikes in a stone-paved courtyard where a hundred soldiers are at their evening meal, and two-thirds of them are killed and wounded.