sing the battery in
his motor-car, raised his hand to one of the gunners, and said, "Un
moment, s'il vous plait!" It was like asking Jove to stop his
thunderbolts.

Some people get accustomed to the noise, but others never. Every
time a battery fired simultaneously one of the men who were with me,
a hard, tough type of mechanic, shrank and ducked his head with an
expression of agonized horror. He confessed to me that it "knocked
his nerves to pieces." Three such men out of six or seven had to be
invalided home in one week. One of them had a crise de nerfs, which
nearly killed him. Yet it was not fear which was the matter with them.
Intellectually they were brave men and coerced themselves into
joining many perilous adventures. It was the intolerable strain upon
the nervous system that made wrecks of them. Some men are
attacked with a kind of madness in the presence of shells. It is what a
French friend of mine called la folie des obus. It is a kind of spiritual
exultation which makes them lose self-consciousness and be caught
up, as it were, in the delirium of those crashing, screaming things. In
the hottest quarter of an hour in Dixmude one of my friends paced
about aimlessly with a dreamy look in his eyes. I am sure he had not
the slightest idea where he was or what he was doing. I believe he
was "outside himself," to use a good old-fashioned phrase. And at
Antwerp, when a convoy of British ambulances escaped with their
wounded through a storm of shells, one man who had shown a
strange hankering for the heart of the inferno, stepped off his car, and
said: "I must go back, I must go back! Those shells call to me." He
went back and has never been heard of again.

Greater than one's fear, more overmastering in one's interest is this
shell-fire. It is frightfully interesting to watch the shrapnel bursting
near bodies of troops, to see the shells kicking up the earth, now in
this direction and now in that; to study a great building gradually losing
its shape and falling into ruins; to see how death takes its toll in an
indiscriminate way--smashing a human being into pulp a few yards
away and leaving oneself alive, or scattering a roadway with bits of
raw flesh which a moment ago was a team of horses, or whipping the
stones about a farmhouse with shrapnel bullets which spit about the
crouching figures of soldiers who stare at these pellets out of sunken
eyes. One's interest holds one in the firing zone with a grip from wh