He envisaged huge unwieldy armies spread along an enormous front and firing with such speed and accuracy that the survivors had to find shelter in trenches. ‘It will be a great war of entrenchments,’ he said. ‘The spade will be as indispensable to a soldier as his rifle. The first thing every man will have to do, if he cares for his life at all, will be to dig a hole in the ground.’ The gap between the two entrenched armies would be so pierced by bullets that no army could hope to storm the enemy’s trenches. In the words of a French captain he quoted, the front line would be a ‘belt of a thousand paces swept by a crossfire of shells which no living being can pass.’ Neither side would win that monstrous battle. While the stalemate continued in the trenches, the civilian population would suffer. Food would become scarce, prices would rise, morale in the cities would quake. Peace would eventually come, Bloch predicted, through famine and socialist or anarchist upheavals, leaving no nation with victory.