Percussion balls fell around us and hurled up smoke and blood together. Legs, hands and necks were cut into black fragments and scattered about. I shut my eyes....” In what unqualified contempt do the masters of the world hold the toilers whom they send into such blood-wasting hells. Shakespeare has expressed the masters’ scorn for the common soldier’s flesh and blood thus: “Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder; food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better.” Here is a glimpse of the battle of Sedan:[82] “Let your readers fancy masses of colored rags glued together with blood and brains, pinned into strange shapes by fragments of bones. Let them conceive men’s bodies without legs, and legs without bodies, heaps of human entrails attached to red and blue cloth, and disembowelled corpses in uniform, bodies lying about in all attitudes with skulls shattered, faces blown off, hips smashed, bones, flesh and gay clothing all pounded together as if brayed in a mortar, extending for miles, not very thick in any one place, but recurring perpetually for weary hours, and then they can not with the most vivid imagination come up to the sickening reality of that butchery [the battle of Sedan, 1870].” IT IS RELIABLY ESTIMATED THAT MODERN ARTILLERY IS CAPABLE OF DOING ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN TIMES MORE DAMAGE THAN THE ARTILLERY USED BY THE GERMAN ARMY IN 1870. Even the simple instrument known as the range-finder adds much to effectiveness,—it enables soldiers to find the range in three minutes and pour death-dealing missiles into the human targets promptly. This instrument weighs about sixty pounds and is being rapidly improved.[83] A single battery of modern artillery can hurl 1,450 rounds upon ten regiments of men while they march one mile and a half. These 1,450 shells arranged with time fuses to burst at the target would sweep these ten thousand men with 275,000 bullets and ragged iron scraps. Bloch says:[84]