it down here and showed it to the men who were working at munitions. This, I believe, did have some effect, or would have had if any stimulus had been needed.'
The German success in trench warfare is entirely due to the use of science. English science, at least equal and probably better, has always been longing to help. The difficulty is to make such help sufficiently available in a country where science has been habitually neglected. We have read again and again that the German flares which guard against night attack are much better than ours. Of course this only means that English chemists have not been asked to discover something better. I will now mention a few other more important matters in which scientific help might with advantage have been appealed to much earlier in the war.
The disaster of Magersfontein immediately raised in my mind the obvious suggestion that the use of smoke as a cover would facilitate approach to an enemy's trench—a suggestion deepened and confirmed by Buller's costly, and for a long time unsuccessful, attempts to relieve Ladysmith. A curtain of smoke rising from a line of smoke-producing shells need not necessarily mean attack on the first, second, or any other particular occasion, but the enemy would be kept in a state of tension and uncertainty favourable to a successful attack when it was finally delivered. Such a method would also be likely to lead to much waste of the enemy's ammunition. We have all read again and again of terribly expensive assaults made on particular positions bristling with machine guns, such as the Hohenzollern Redoubt, and how our men were mown down directly they left their trenches. Not doubting that such attacks could be rendered far less costly, I wrote about a year ago to a friend in the War Office, suggesting