I ran from the machine gun, ducking in at the first pit I came to, and here I saw men who without a word, their movements as regular as machines, were loading, firing ... loading, firing. They were shorter than I, and by raising a trifle on my toes, I could squint along their gun barrels and see the patch of the open field that their loop hole framed. I saw a confusion of color--the green, unearthly haze of the rockets; a wavering red hue of fire that had a way of rushing at you, vanishing and then appearing further back, rushing at you again; and I saw a patch of mud, glistening like mottled tarnished silver in the rain, and once when a whitish rocket burst, the air seemed to be sparkling with myriad drops of silver and diamonds. And the rain poured down; and the guns shook the sky; and the rifles rattled on. I began to notice then, by craning my head from left to right, that the red wavering lines of fire, which had a way of rushing at you and vanishing to appear again further back, was slower now in appearing after it lost itself somewhere in the mud, and then it became even slower in showing itself and finally when it came, you saw that it had disintegrated into segments, that it was no longer a steady oncoming line, rather a slowly squirming thing like the curling parts of some monstrous fiery worm that had been chopped to bits and was squirming its life away out there on the mud. And it dawned upon you in horror that the fiery red lines had been lines of men, shooting as they had come; and that, when one line had been mowed down, another had rushed up from behind, so on almost endlessly it had seemed until they came broken and squirmed like the others had done, into the mud, and came no more. And the spell that you had been held in was broken; and you remembered that there was a God, and you thanked Him that your hands had found nothing with which to kill.... And coming across that stretch of mud--only one hundred and fifty meters were their trenches--broke forth the rattle of the English machine guns and the fever of it over, you could reason out what that meant. The English attack had failed and now they were sweeping the field with machine gun fire so that the Germans could not form and storm in turn. Their shells, too, no longer exploded behind our trenches, but in front, and you knew that the English had telephoned back to their artillery to shorten the range about fifty meters, making that field a muddy Golgotha in which nothing could live and upon which their own wounded must be being slain by the score. We had almost ceased firing. In the pits I heard the straggling shots that mean "at will," but our machine guns were silent. The rockets still swished upward, making their parabola of sparks and keeping the night hideous with their bursting green. The Lieutenant was running down the trench towards me. "You're not hurt?" he asked. I told him no, and he seemed immeasurably relieved. What a futile outsider you felt!