Before the men came to fetch him, Singley managed to add to his list:
| No. | 848. | Our war-correspondent, Singley, mortally wounded by a Japanese shell. Hail Columbia! |
Then he closed his book and put it in his breast pocket. Five minutes later two ambulance men carried him off to have his wounds attended to, and in the evening he was conveyed to the hospital.
A week later Captain Lange's snapshot of the war-correspondent was paraded in the New York Herald as the dramatic close of Singley's journalistic career. In his way he, too, had been a hero. He died in the hospital at Salubria.
He could claim the credit of having made the war plain to those at home. Or was that not the war after all? Were the black shadows on the photographic plate anything more than what is left of a flower after the botanist has pressed the faded semblance of its former self between the leaves of his collection? Certainly not much more.
No, that is not war. Just a bursting—silently bursting shell, the scattering of a company—that is not war.
Thousands of bursting shells, the howls of the whizzing bullets, the constant nerve-racking crashing and roaring overhead, the deafening cracking of splitting iron everywhere—that is war. And accompanying it all the hopeless sensation that this will never, never stop, that it will go on like this forever, until one's thoughts are dulled by some terrible, cruel, incomprehensible, demoralizing force. Those bounding puffs of smoke everywhere on the ground, rifle shots which have been aimed too short and every one of which— That abominable sharp singing as of a swarm of mosquitoes, buzz, buzz, like the buzzing of angry hornets continually knocking their heads against a window-pane. Bang! That hit a stone. Bang! two inches nearer, then—"Aim carefully, fire slowly!" calls the lieutenant in a hoarse, dry voice. You aim carefully and fire slowly and reload. Buzz— And then you fume with a fierce uncontrollable rage because you must aim carefully and fire slowly. And the whole space in front of the trenches is covered with infantry bullets glittering in the sunlight. Will it ever stop? Never! A day like that has a hundred hours—two hundred. And if you had been there all by yourself, you would never have dreamed of shooting over the edge of the trenches—you would most probably have been crouching down in the pit. But as you happen not to be alone, this can't be done. Will the enemy's ammunition never give out? It's awful the way he keeps on shooting.
And that terrible thirst! Your throat is parched and your teeth feel blunt from grinding the grains of sand which fly into your face whenever an impudent little puff of smoke jumps up directly in front of you. Sssst. The mosquitoes keep on singing, and the bees buzz perpetually. Those dogs over there, those wretches, those— Buzz, buzz, buzz—it never stops, never. Over there to the right somebody cracks a joke and several soldiers laugh. "Aim carefully, fire slowly!" sounds the warning voice of the lieutenant. And it's all done on an empty stomach—a perfectly empty stomach.
Just as the field-kitchen wagon had arrived this morning, a shell had exploded in the road and it was all over with the kitchen-wagon. How long ago that seemed! And the bees keep on humming. Bang! that hit the sergeant right in the middle of the forehead. Is this never going to stop? Never? You chew sand, you breathe sand, burning dry sand, which passes through your intestines like fire. And then that horrible, faint, sickening feeling in the stomach when you feel the ambulance men creeping up behind to take away another one of your comrades! How terrible he looks, how he screams! You are quite incensed to think that anybody can yell like that! What a fool! "Aim carefully, fire slowly," warns the lieutenant. Bouncing puffs of smoke again! And sand in your mouth and fire in your intestines. You think continually of water, beautiful, clear, ice-cold water, never-ending streams of water— A roaring, howling and crashing overhead, the clatter of splinters, a sharp pain in your brain and a horrible feeling in your stomach and all the time it goes buzz, buzz, buzz—ssst—ssst—buzz, buzz, buzz——
That is war, not the pictures that people see at home, all those lucky people who have lots of water, who can go where they like and are not forced to stay where the bees keep up a continual buzz, buzz, buzz——