Then from
the heavier guns come dense puff-balls of tawny orange, violet, and
heliotrope, followed by fleecy little cumuli of purest white. One's mind
is absorbed in this pageant of shell-fire, and with a curious intentness,
with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have
described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself,
bursting quite close, killing people not very far away.
Men who have been in the trenches under heavy shell-fire,
sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment like
men who have been buried alive. They have the brownish, ashen
colour of death. They tremble as through anguish. They are dazed
and stupid for a time. But they go back. That is the marvel of it. They
go back day after day, as the Belgians went day after day. There is
no fun in it, no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used
perhaps--gods know--to belong to warfare when men were matched
against men, and not against unapproachable artillery. This is their
courage, stronger than all their fear. There is something in us, even
divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it
comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the
thunderbolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though we know
the terror of it.
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