were organized into fifteen divisions. Each group of three divisions was cannon, one hundred and fifty miles of wire were strung across the In the supreme emergency of war, the telephone is as indispensable, very city officials. In two days these were linked to long-distance wires; soldiers strung the costliest of all telephone lines, at 203 Metre Hill. Of the seven million telephones in the United States, about two million means of this glistening red wire, the various batteries and regiments battlefield. As the Japanese said, it was this "flying telephone" that playing a game of chess. It was in this war, too, that the Mikado's telephone set. If they held their position, two other soldiers ran wired to a general, and the five generals were wired to the great Oyama who handled their armies by telephone when they drove back the Russians. Russian hosts in a vast crescent, a hundred miles from end to end. By were at work. In one day there was a system of wires for the use of the enabled Oyama to manipulate his forces as handily as though he were twenty-four thousand lives. nearly, as the cannon. This, at least, is the belief of the Japanese, Each body of Japanese troops moved forward like a silkworm, leaving When the wire had been basted up this hill to the summit, the fortress himself, who sat ten miles back of the firing-line and sent his orders. of Port Arthur lay at their mercy. But the climb had cost them of Mukden, the silk-worm army, with a million legs, crept against the and in eleven days a two-thousand-line switchboard was in full working forward with a spool of wire. In this way and under fire of the Russian behind it a glistening strand of red copper wire. At the decisive battle Whenever a regiment lunged forward, one of the soldiers carried a trim. This feat still stands as the record in rebuilding.