To perfect this monstrous engine, with its pontoon bridges, its wireless, its hospitals, its aeroplanes that in rigid alignment sailed before it, its field telephones that, as it advanced, strung wires over which for miles the vanguard talked to the rear, all modern inventions had been prostituted.

"There really doesn't seem any other way," said Harvey D. at the table, putting a disordered pile of magazines into neat alignment.

I wondered if the rather slovenly ill-trained battalions of small pale men could stand up against the prompt rigid alignment of the broad-shouldered six-footers I had seen manoeuvring on the other side of the Rhine.