Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/617

Rh of a submarine difficult or impossible to see, and therefore help the attacking vessel. We note that the weather was "bitterly cold" at the time when the British cruiser Hawke was torpedoed, so that the chances of saving the men who were struggling in the water were greatly lessened. Special precautions should be taken to guard against collision, shipwreck and submarine attack, as the winter comes on. The German fleet is doubtless waiting for a winter gale to scatter the British ships. At the end of October a severe storm was raging in the North Sea—a sure sign of the approach of winter—and was making life on board of the smaller vessels, the torpedo boats and submarines, most uncomfortable. Archangel, which evidently served as a very important port for the Allies during the summer, is now frozen, and will remain so until next summer.

Thus, throughout the area of the Great "War, the weather from day to day is playing its part in the campaign. Modern military tactics; modern armament; modern methods of all kinds, have not in any way eliminated the weather element as a factor of the greatest importance. The story of the present war does not, thus far, read so very differently from that of the stories of previous wars in the same countries. In 1586, the Spanish, as related by Motley, encountered such terrible rains on the Meuse that they retreated. A previous fall of Namur, in 1692, was largely due to heavy rains which prevented the English from crossing the river and meeting the besieging French army. The English in Flanders in 1708-09 endured great hardships on account of deep snows, which blocked the roads. The cold was intense and the troops, who were short of firewood, suffered severely. The Duke of Marlborough wrote (1708): "Till this frost yields we can neither break ground for our batteries nor open our trenches." The French, in Poland, in 1806-07, found mud 3 feet deep; drenching rains; driving sleet; melting snow and icy streams. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, over the same historic ground in France, we read of torrential rains; floods; icy roads; muddy fields, and of sufferings on account of cold.

So the story goes on, from age to age, from one war to the next. War and the weather: they are related to-day, as they were in the past, physically, physiologically, psychologically, and as they will be until wars shall cease.