shoved into the gun. A horrid bang--the missile
has disappeared, has simply gone. Where it has gone, what it has
done, nobody in the hut seems to care. There is a telephone close
by, but only numbers and formulae--and perhaps an occasional
rebuke--come out of the telephone, in response to which the
perspiring men make minute adjustments in the gun or in the next
missile.

Of the target I am absolutely ignorant, and so are the perspiring
men. I am free to go forth and look for the target. It is pointed out to
me. It may be a building or a group of buildings; it may be
something else. At best, it is nothing but a distant spot on a highly
complex countryside. I see a faint puff of smoke, seemingly as
harmless as a feather momentarily floating. And I think: Can any
reasonable person expect that those men with that noisy
contrivance in the enclosed hut away back shall plant a mass of
metal into that far-off tiny red patch of masonry lost in the vast
landscape? And, even if by chance they do, for what reason has
that particular patch been selected? What influence could its
destruction have on the mighty course of the struggle? . . . Thus it is
that war seems vague and casual, because a mere fragment of it
defeats the imagination, and the bits of even the fragment cannot
be fitted together. Why, I have stood in the first-line trench itself and
heard a fusillade all round me, and yet have seen nothing and
understood nothing of the action!

It is the same with the movements of troops. For example, I slept in
a town behind the front, IN and I was wakened up--not, as often, by
an aeroplane--but by a tremendous shaking and throbbing of the
hotel. This went on for a long time, from just after dawn till about six
o'clock, when it stopped, only to recommence after a few minutes. I
got up, and found that, in addition to the hotel, the whole town was
shaking and throbbing. A regiment was passing through it in auto-
buses. Each auto-bus held about thirty men, and the vehicles rattled
after one another at a distance of at most thirty yards. The auto-
buses were painted the colour of battleships, and were absolutely
uniform except that some had permanent and some only temporary
roofs, and some had mica windows and some only holes in the
sides. All carried the same number of soldiers, and in all the rifles
were stacked in precisely the same fashion. When one auto-bus
stopped, all stopped, and the soldiers waved and smiled to girls at
wi