But what I would like to know is the exact psychological reaction of the men who are ordered to handle the big modern siege guns. During the war a great many people performed a great many strange tasks, but was there ever a more absurd job than firing dicke Berthas? All other soldiers knew more or less what they were doing. A flying man could judge by the rapidly spreading red glow whether he had hit the gas factory or not. The submarine commander could return after a couple of hours to judge by the abundance of flotsam in how far he had been successful. The poor devil in his dug-out had the satisfaction of realizing that by his mere continued presence in a particular trench he was at least holding his own. Even the artillerist, working his field-piece upon an invisible object, could take down the telephone and could ask his colleague, hidden in a dead tree seven miles away, whether the doomed church tower was showing signs of deterioration or whether he should try again at a different angle. But the brotherhood of the big guns lived in a strange and unreal world of their own. Even with the assistance of a couple of full-fledged professors of ballistics, they were unable to foretell what fate awaited those projectiles which they shot so blithely into space. Their shells might actually hit the object for which they were destined. They might land in the midst of a powder factory or in the heart of a fortress. But then again they might strike a church or an orphan asylum or they might bury themselves peacefully in a river or in a gravel pit without doing any harm whatsoever. Authors, it seems to me, have much in common with the siege-gunners. They too handle a sort of heavy artillery. Their literary missiles may start a revolution or a conflagration in the most unlikely spots. But more often they are just poor duds and lie harmless in a nearby field until they are used for scrap iron or converted into an umbrella-stand or a flower pot. Surely there never was a period in history when so much rag-pulp was consumed within so short a space as the era commonly known as the Renaissance. Every Tomasso, Ricardo and Enrico of the Italian peninsula, every Doctor Thomasius, Professor Ricardus and Dominus Heinrich of the great Teuton plain rushed into print with at least a dozen duodecimos. Not to mention the Tomassinos who wrote pretty little sonnets in imitation of the Greeks, the Ricardinos who reeled off odes after the best pattern of their Roman grandfathers, and the countless lovers of coins, statuary, images, pictures, manuscripts and ancient armor who for almost three centuries kept themselves busy classifying, ordering, tabulating, listing, filing and codifying what they had just dug out of the ancestral ruins and who then published their collections in countless folios illuminated with the most beautiful of copper engravings and the most ponderous of wood-cuts.