"Ready! No. I gun. Fire!"
The missile is already a-wing, and for the space of a moment we feel the iron messenger flitting past. The air is a-hum. Boom—and a thousand yards in front of us the shell has exploded above the cavalry riding to the attack, and has spattered its rain of lead over the blue targets. And then Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
The next target was about a mile away, and the new range quickly found. Again the strange missile sped away and covered its measured course. It was a thing to marvel at, to see how it checked in the air of its own volition and burst. It seemed as though each one of these iron cylinders had a brain—as if it were endowed with life and consciousness—so certainly did it find its billet.
And when the battery had ceased firing and had limbered up, and the danger cone had been pulled down, we went out into the field of fire. There the linked targets under fire were lying. They had been struck down by the shrapnel—all, the whole line. Head, body, limbs;—we did not find a single figure there that had not been drilled through and through. We stood and marvelled at the accuracy of it, and with a silent shudder thought of targets other than contraptions of laths and canvas.
Wonder whether they have engines of such perfect precision on the other side?
How the experts have, day in, day out, been inventing and constructing new marvels of mechanism. The mechanical side of war has been raised to a high standard of genius and a fine art. Two hundred and forty bullets and more to the minute! What a marvel of mechanism one of those machine-guns is. You set it buzzing, and it spurts out bullets thicker than rain can fall. And the automaton licks its lips hungrily and sweeps from right to left. It is pointed on the middle of the body, and sprays the whole firing-line with one sweep. It is as though Death had scrapped his scythe for old iron; as if nowadays he had graduated as expert mechanic. They have ceased to mow corn by hand nowadays. By this time of day even the sheaves are gathered up by machinery. And so they will have to shovel our millions of bodies underground with burying machines.
Curse! I cannot get rid of this hideous; thought. It is always cropping up again. We have passed on from retail to wholesale methods of business. In place of the loom at which you sat working with your own hands, they have now set the great power-looms in motion. Once it was a knightly death, an honorable soldier's death; now it is death by machinery.
That is what is sticking in my gullet. We are being hustled from life to death by experts—by mechanicians. And just as they turn out buttons and pins by wholesale methods of production, so they are now turning out the crippled and the dead by machinery. Why do I, all of a sudden, begin to shudder? I feel as if it had suddenly become clear as daylight that this is madness—blood-red madness lowering for us there.
Curse! I must not go on brooding over it any longer, or it will drive me mad. Your rifle at the ready! The enemy is facing you! Has that ceased to be a case of man to man? What does it matter even if the bullet finds its billet more surely? Aim steadily—straight for the chest.... Who is it really facing me? The man I am now going to shoot dead! An enemy? What is an enemy?
And again I see myself on that glorious morning of my holidays, at a French railway station, and again I am gazing curiously out of the window. A foreign country and a stranger-people. The moment for departure has come. The station-master is just giving the signal. Then a little old woman extends her trembling hand to the window, and a fine young fellow in our carriage takes the wrinkled hand and strokes it, until the old woman's tears course down her motherly cheeks. Not a word does she speak. She only looks at her boy, and the lad gazes down on his mother. Then it flashes upon me like a revelation. Foreigners can shed tears. Why, that is just the same thing it is with us. They weep when they take leave of one another. They love one another and feel grief.... And as the train rolled out of the station, I kept on looking out of the window and seeing the old woman standing on the platform so desolately, and gazing after the train without stirring. I could not help thinking of my own mother. It was I myself who was saying good-by there, and on the platform yonder my poor old mother was in tears. Pocket-handkerchiefs were floating in the breeze. They were waving their hands, and I waved mine too; for I, too, was one who belonged to her....