"Captain!" shouts the hard, naked, impudent voice we all know. "Haven't you got any cotton wool for us to plug our ears with?"
We have all turned round as if at the word of command. It is the militia-man, the yokel, standing facing the captain and gesticulating at him. "I only wanted to ask if those are wild beasts, or if they're what are called human beings you've torn to pieces there?"
But curt and sharp, as we knew it, the rasping note of command responds:
"What the devil's the matter with you? Pull yourself together. Can't you hear? Get back to your place at once."
But then it bursts out, the voice of Nature, and resounds so harshly, and tears down all barriers.
"Murderers!" roars a blasphemous mouth. "Murderers of men! We shall have to knock them all on the head like dogs."
We all start as if under an electric shock ... that was what was on the tip of the tongues of all of us ... that was the climax that was bound to come ... we cannot endure to go on lying in this charnel-house any longer....
"You mind what you're about." The other's wrath breaks out once more ... and then we know it for certain, the captain is a fool ... he has lost the game from the very start ... and now ... it is like a shadow play before my eyes ... like a ghostly kinematograph.... I see that the militia-man has drawn his bayonet ... the captain is standing facing him with his revolver in his hand, and gives him an order ... he promptly gets a blow with the butt end of the rifle on his head that fells him to the ground without a sound ... and they leap up from all the trenches.... "Murderers!" they cry. "Murderers! Kill them!"
There is no stopping it now.... I feel I have gone mad.... I do not know where I am.... I see wild beasts all round me distorted unnaturally in a life-and-death grapple ... with bloodshot eyes, with foaming, gnashing mouths, they attack and kill one another, and try to mangle one another.... I leap to my feet.... I must get away, to escape from myself, or in another minute I shall be in the thick of this maddened, death-doomed mob.... I stumble over the rifle-pits.... I race out into the night, and tread on quaking flesh ... step on hard heads, and stumble over weapons and helmets ... something is clutching at my feet like hands, so that I race away like a hunted deer with the hounds at its heels ... and ever more bodies—breathless—out of one field into another.... Horror is crooning over my head ... horror is crooning beneath my feet ... and nothing but dying, mangled flesh....
Has the whole earth exploded then?... Are there nothing but dead abroad this night?... Has every human being been fusilladed?