The missile is already a-wing, and for the space of a moment we feel the iron messenger flitting past. The air is a-hum. Boom--and a thousand yards in front of us the shell has exploded above the cavalry riding to the attack, and has spattered its rain of lead over the blue targets. And then Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. The next target was about a mile away, and the new range quickly found. Again the strange missile sped away and covered its measured course. It was a thing to marvel at, to see how it checked in the air of its own volition and burst. It seemed as though each one of these iron cylinders had a brain--as if it were endowed with life and consciousness--so certainly did it find its billet. And when the battery had ceased firing and had limbered up, and the danger cone had been pulled down, we went out into the field of fire. There the linked targets under fire were lying. They had been struck down by the shrapnel--all, the whole line. Head, body, limbs;--we did not find a single figure there that had not been drilled through and through. We stood and marvelled at the accuracy of it, and with a silent shudder thought of targets other than contraptions of laths and canvas. Wonder whether they have engines of such perfect precision on the other side? How the experts have, day in, day out, been inventing and constructing new marvels of mechanism. The mechanical side of war has been raised to a high standard of genius and a fine art. Two hundred and forty bullets and more to the minute! What a marvel of mechanism one of those machine-guns is. You set it buzzing, and it spurts out bullets thicker than rain can fall. And the automaton licks its lips hungrily and sweeps from right to left. It is pointed on the middle of the body, and sprays the whole firing-line with one sweep. It is as though Death had scrapped his scythe for old iron; as if nowadays he had graduated as expert mechanic. They have ceased to mow corn by hand nowadays. By this time of day even the sheaves are gathered up by machinery. And so they will have to shovel our millions of bodies underground with burying machines. Curse! I cannot get rid of this hideous; thought. It is always cropping up again. We have passed on from retail to wholesale methods of business. In place of the loom at which you sat working with your own hands, they have now set the great power-looms in motion. Once it was a knightly death, an honorable soldier's death; now it is death by machinery. That is what is sticking in my gullet. We are being hustled from life to death by experts--by mechanicians. And just as they turn out buttons and pins by wholesale methods of production, so they are now turning out the crippled and the dead by machinery. Why do I, all of a sudden, begin to shudder? I feel as if it had suddenly become clear as daylight that this is madness--blood-red madness lowering for us there.