[Sidenote: Undecided warfare.] [Sidenote: Bread made of roots.] This slow and undecided mode of warfare between the two vast armies continued for many months without any decisive results. There were skirmishes, struggles, sieges, blockades, and many brief and partial conflicts, but no general and decided battle. Now the advantage seemed on one side, and now on the other. Pompey so hemmed in Caesar's troops at one period, and so cut off his supplies, that the men were reduced to extreme distress for food. At length they found a kind of root which they dug from the ground, and, after drying and pulverizing it, they made a sort of bread of the powder, which the soldiers were willing to eat rather than either starve or give up the contest. They told Caesar, in fact, that they would live on the bark of trees rather than abandon his cause. Pompey's soldiers, at one time, coming near to the walls of a town which they occupied, taunted and jeered them on account of their wretched destitution of food. Caesar's soldiers threw loaves of this bread at them in return, by way of symbol that they were abundantly supplied. [Sidenote: Caesar hems Pompey in.] [Sidenote: Anxiety of the rivals.] After some time the tide of fortune turned Caesar contrived, by a succession of adroit maneuvers and movements, to escape from his toils, and to circumvent and surround Pompey's forces so as soon to make them suffer destitution and distress in their turn. He cut off all communication between them and the country at large, and turned away the brooks and streams from flowing through the ground they occupied. An army of forty or fifty thousand men, with the immense number of horses and beasts of burden which accompany them, require very large supplies of water, and any destitution or even scarcity of water leads immediately to the most dreadful consequences. Pompey's troops dug wells, but they obtained only very insufficient supplies. Great numbers of beasts of burden died, and their decaying bodies so tainted the air as to produce epidemic diseases, which destroyed many of the troops, and depressed and disheartened those whom they did not destroy. [Sidenote: Nature of the contest between Caesar and Pompey.] [Sidenote: Both hesitate.] During all these operations there was no decisive general battle. Each one of the great rivals knew very well that his defeat in one general battle would be his utter and irretrievable ruin. In a war between two independent nations, a single victory, however complete, seldom terminates the struggle, for the defeated party has the resources of a whole realm to fall back upon, which are sometimes called forth with renewed vigor after experiencing such reverses; and then defeat in such cases, even if it be final, does not necessarily involve the ruin of the unsuccessful commander. He may negotiate an honorable peace, and return