He offered to show me some live men, and took me to one of the telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I focused for distance. Suddenly out of the blur of the lens there sprang up in front of me, seemingly quite close, a zigzagging toy trench cut in the face of a little hillock. This trench was full of gray figures of the size of very small dolls. They were moving aimlessly back and forth, it seemed to me, doing nothing at all. Then I saw another trench that ran slantwise up the hillock and it contained more of the pygmies. A number of these pygmies came out of their trench--I could see them quite plainly, clambering up the steep wall of it--and they moved, very slowly it would seem, toward the crosswise trench on ahead a bit. To reach it they had to cross a sloping green patch of cleared land. So far as I might tell no explosive or shrapnel shower fell into them or near them, but when they had gone perhaps a third of the distance across the green patch there was a quick scatteration of their inch-high figures. Quite distinctly I counted three manikins who instantly fell down flat and two others who went ahead a little way deliberately, and then lay down. The rest darted back to the cover which they had just quit and jumped in briskly. The five figures remained where they had dropped and became quiet. Anyway, I could detect no motion in them. They were just little gray strips. Into my mind on the moment came incongruously a memory of what I had seen a thousand times in the composing room of a country newspaper where the type was set by hand. I thought of five pica plugs lying on the printshop floor. It was hard for me to make myself believe that I had seen human beings killed and wounded. I can hardly believe it yet--that those insignificant toy-figures were really and truly men. I watched through the glass after that for possibly twenty minutes, until the summons came for lunch, but no more of the German dolls ventured out of their make- believe defenses to be blown flat by an invisible blast.