s master's house, distrustful of men who did things not
belonging to the code of beasts.

24

Human qualities were not annihilated, I have said. Yet in a general
way that was the effect of modern weapons, and at Ypres masses of
men did not fight so much as stand until they died.

"We just wait for death," said a Belgian officer one night, "and wonder
if it doesn't reach us out of all this storm of shells. It is a war without
soul or adventure. In the early days, when I scoured the country with
a party of motor scouts there was some sport in it. Any audacity we
had, or any cunning, could get some kind of payment. The individual
counted."

"But now, in the business round Ypres, what can men do--infantry,
cavalry, scouts? It is the gun that does all the business heaving out
shells, delivering death in a merciless way. It is guns, with men as
targets, helpless as the leaves that are torn from these autumn trees
around us by a storm of hail. Our men are falling like the leaves, and
the ground is heaped with them, and there is no decisive victory on
either side. One week of death is followed by another week of death.
The position changes a little, that is all, and the business goes on
again. It is appalling."

The same words were used to me on the same night by a surgeon
who had just come from the station of Dunkirk, where the latest batch
of wounded--a thousand of them--were lying on the straw. "It is
appalling," he said. "The destruction of this shell-fire is making a
shambles of human bodies. How can we cope with it? What can we
do with such a butchery?"

Round about Furnes there was a fog in the war zone. In the early
dawn until the morning had passed, and then again as the dusk fell
and the mists crept along the canals and floated over the flat fields,
men groped about it like ghosts, with ghostly guns.

Shells came hurtling out of the veil of the mist and burst in places
which seemed hidden behind cotton-wool. An unseen enemy was
killing unseen men, and other guns replied into this grim, grey
mystery, not knowing what destruction was being done.

It was like the war itself, which was utterly shrouded in these parts by
a fog of mystery. Watching it close at hand (when things are more
difficult to sort into any order of logic) my view was clouded and
perplexed by the general confusion. A few days previously, it seemed
that the enemy had abandoned his attack upon the coast-line and the
country between Dixmud