cannon were but children's toys.

Certainly the human arm was of the same length then as now, a pike-thrust
was as effective as the stab of the most improved bayonet, and when it
came, as it was always the purpose to do, to the close embrace of foemen,
the work was done as thoroughly as it could be in this second half of the
nineteenth century.

Nevertheless it is impossible not to hope that such progress in science
must at last render long wars impossible. The Dutch war of independence
had already lasted nearly forty years. Had the civil war in America upon
the territory of half a continent been waged with the Ostend machinery it
might have lasted two centuries. Something then may have been gained for
humanity by giving war such preter-human attributes as to make its
demands of gold and blood too exhaustive to become chronic.

Yet the loss of human life during that summer and winter was sufficiently
wholesale as compared with the meagre results. Blood flowed in torrents,
for no man could be more free of his soldiers' lives than was the
cardinal-archduke, hurling them as he did on the enemy's works before the
pretence of a practical breach had been effected, and before a reasonable
chance existed of purchasing an advantage at such a price. Five hundred
were killed outright in half-an-hour's assault on an impregnable position
one autumn evening, and lay piled in heaps beneath the Sand Hill fort-
many youthful gallants from Spain and Italy among them, noble volunteers
recognised by their perfumed gloves and golden chains, and whose pockets
were worth rifling. The Dutch surgeons, too, sallied forth in strength
after such an encounter, and brought in great bags filled with human fat
esteemed the sovereignst remedy in the world for wounds and disease.