The End of the First Act '55 Such were the seven days, which were the first act in the great war drama, possibly, regard being had to the means for transmitting news unknown in all the world struggles of the past, the most interesting seven days any generation of mankind had lived through. As a human spectacle it was hardly to be equalled in history, as it was daily, hourly, brought before the amazed world still doubting its stricken senses. " It is well war is so terrible," said General Lee, surely the gentlest of great soldiers, to his staff one day, " else we might grow too fond of it." Some such feeling must have come to every one at the end of this great prelude. But now the nations had taken their stand. France and England forgetting Blenheim and Waterloo, France and Russia forgiv- ing Moscow and the Crimea, England and Russia burying those jealousies in Asia which had made European peace precarious for a generation, had struck hands. Belgium, Servia, perhaps Holland, drawn into the train, were following. Against Wil- liam II, as against Napoleon and Louis XIV, Europe was rising in one more Grand Alliance. It remained now to look at the narrow opening between the Vosges and the southern frontier of Holland, a stretch little wider than that between Albany and New York, through which into Bel- gium and into France the great armies of the German Kaiser were coming. Here in days that could not be many, however long they seemed, an-