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.

Curse! I must not go on brooding over it any longer, or it will drive me mad. Your rifle at the ready! The enemy is facing you! Has that ceased to be a case of man to man? What does it matter even if the bullet finds its billet more surely? Aim steadily—straight for the chest.... Who is it really facing me? The man I am now going to shoot dead! An enemy? What is an enemy?

And again I see myself on that glorious morning of my holidays, at a French railway station, and again I am gazing curiously out of the window. A foreign country and a stranger-people. The moment for departure has come. The station-master is just giving the signal. Then a little old woman extends her trembling hand to the window, and a fine young fellow in our carriage takes the wrinkled hand and strokes it, until the old woman's tears course down her motherly cheeks. Not a word does she speak. She only looks at her boy, and the lad gazes down on his mother. Then it flashes upon me like a revelation. Foreigners can shed tears. Why, that is just the same thing it is with us. They weep when they take leave of one another. They love one another and feel grief.... And as the train rolled out of the station, I kept on looking out of the window and seeing the old woman standing on the platform so desolately, and gazing after the train without stirring. I could not help thinking of my own mother. It was I myself who was saying good-by there, and on the platform yonder my poor old mother was in tears. Pocket-handkerchiefs were floating in the breeze. They were waving their hands, and I waved mine too; for I, too, was one who belonged to her....

And again I put my rifle to my shoulder, and take aim for the centre of the target.

I will not go on torturing myself with these thoughts.

The target seems to have been moved nearer to me.

Of a sudden it seems to me as if the blue-painted figure had stepped out of its white square. I gape at it. I distinctly see a face in front of me. I have got my finger on the trigger, and feel the tension of the pressure. Why don't I pull it through? My finger is trembling.... Now, now, I recognize the face. That is the young fellow at Nancy who was saying good-by to his mother....

Then the spring gives, and the great horror masters me, for I have fired straight into a living face. Murderer! Murderer! You have shot the only son of his mother dead. Thou art thy brother's murderer....

I take a hold on myself. I pull myself together. A murderer?

Folly! A spook!

You are a soldier.

Soldiers cease to be human beings. The Fatherland is at stake.

And without turning a hair I take aim at the enemy. If you miss him he will get you.

"Got him! In the middle of the chest."

CHAPTER III

OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN

We rejoined the Colors on Friday. On Monday we are to move out. Today, being Sunday, is full-dress Church Parade.

I slept badly last night, and am feeling uneasy and limp.

And now we are sitting close-packed in church.

The organ is playing a voluntary.

I am leaning back and straining my ears for the sounds in the dim twilight of the building. Childhood's days rise before my eyes again. I am watching a little solemn-faced boy sitting crouched in a corner and listening to the divine service. The priest is standing in front of the altar, and is intoning the Exhortation devoutly. The choir in the gallery is chanting the responses. The organ thunders out and floods through the building majestically. I am rapt in an ecstasy of sweet terror, for the Lord God is coming down upon us. He is standing before me and touching my body, so that I have to close my eyes in a terror of shuddering ecstasy....

That is long, long ago, and is all past and done with, as youth itself is past and done with....

Strange! After all these years of doubt and unbelief, at this moment of lucid consciousness, the atmosphere of devoutness, long since dead, possesses me, and thrills me so passionately that I can hardly resist it. This is the same heavy twilight—these are the same yearning angel voices—the same fearful sense of rapture——

I pull myself together, and sit bolt upright on the hard wooden pew.

In the main and the side aisles below, and in the galleries above, nothing but soldiers in uniform, and all, with level faces, turned toward the altar, toward that pale man in his long dignified black gown, toward that sonorous, unctuous mouth, from whose lips flows the name of God.

Look! He is now stretching forth his hands. We incline our heads. He is pronouncing the Benediction over us in a voice that echoes from the tomb. He is blessing us in the name of God, the Merciful. He is blessing our rifles that they may not fail us; he is blessing the wire-drawn guns on their patent recoilless carriages; he is blessing every precious cartridge, lest a single bullet be wasted, lest any pass idly through the air; that each one may account for a hundred human beings, may shatter a hundred human beings simultaneously.

Father in Heaven! Thou art gazing down at us in such terrible silence. Dost Thou shudder at these sons of men? Thou poor and slight God! Thou couldst only rain Thy paltry pitch and sulphur on Sodom and Gomorrah. But we, Thy children, whom Thou hast created, we are going to exterminate them by high-pressure machinery, and butcher whole cities in factories. Here we stand, and while we stretch our hands to Thy Son in prayer, and cry Hosannah! we are hurling shells and shrapnel in the face of Thy Image, and shooting the Son of Man down from His Cross like a target at the rifle-butts.

And now the Holy Communion is being celebrated. The organ is playing mysteriously from afar off, and the flesh and blood of the Redeemer is mingling with our flesh and blood.

There He is hanging on the Cross above me, and gazing down upon me.

How pale