One's interest holds one in the firing zone with a grip from which
one's intelligence cannot escape whatever may be one's cowardice.
It is the most satisfying thrill of horror in the world. How foolish this
death is! How it picks and chooses, taking a man here and leaving a
man there by just a hair's-breadth of difference. It is like looking into
hell and watching the fury of supernatural forces at play with human
bodies, tearing them to pieces with great splinters of steel and
burning them in the furnace-fires of shell-stricken towns, and in a
devilish way obliterating the image of humanity in a welter of blood.
There is a beauty in it too, for the aestheticism of a Nero. Beautiful
and terrible were the fires of those Belgian towns which I watched
under a star-strewn sky. There was a pure golden glow, as of liquid
metal, beneath the smoke columns and the leaping tongues of flame.
And many colours were used to paint this picture of war, for the
enemy used shells with different coloured fumes, by which I was told
they studied the effect of their fire. Most vivid is the ordinary shrapnel,
which tears a rent through the black volumes of smoke rolling over a
smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue.
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