“I am in the field hospital now, with a nice little hole in my left shoulder, through which a bullet of one of the War Lord’s military subjects has passed,” writes a wounded Frenchman to a friend in London. “My shoulder feels much as if some playful joker has touched it with a lighted cigar.... It is strange, but in the face of death and destruction I catch myself trying to make out where the shell has fallen, as if I were an interested spectator at a rifle competition. And I was not the only one. I saw many curious faces around me, bearing expressions full of interest, just as if the owners of the respective faces formed the auditorium of a highly fascinating theatrical performance, without having anything to do with the play itself. The impression crossed my mind in one-thousandth part of a second, and was followed by numerous others, altogether alien from the most serious things which were happening and going to happen. The human mind is a curious and complicated thing. Now that we were shooting at the enemy, and often afterwards in the midst of a fierce battle, I heard some remark made or some funny expression used which proved that the speaker’s thoughts were far from realising the terrible facts around him. It has nothing to do with heartlessness or anything like that. I don’t know yet what it is. Perhaps I shall have an opportunity to philosophise on it later on.” There is a curious comment in a letter from Sergeant Major MacDermott, who writes during the great retreat from Mons, when everybody had become inured to the atmosphere of the battlefield. “We’re wonderfully cheerful, and happy as bare-legged urchins scampering over the fields,” he says, and adds, “It is the quantity not the quality of the German shells that are having effect on us, and it’s not so much the actual damage to life as the hellish nerve-racking noise that counts for so much. Townsmen who are used to the noise of the streets can stand it a lot better than the countrymen, and I think you will find that by far the fittest are those regiments recruited in the big cities. A London lad near me says it is no worse than the roar of motor-buses in the City on a busy day.” But the most graphic and minutely detailed picture of the psychic experiences of a soldier plunged for the first time into the pandemonium of a modern battle is given in the _Retch_ by a wounded Russian artillery officer writing from a St. Petersburg hospital. “I cannot say where we fought, for we are forbidden to divulge that, but I will tell you my own experiences,” he says. “In times of peace one has no conception of what a battle really means. When war was declared our brigade was despatched to the theatre of operations. I went with delight, and so did the others. When we reached our destination we were told that the battle would begin in the morning.