shell whose direction you have ordered, you somehow forget to think of
them as individuals, any more than the bear-hunter thinks of the cubs
that will be left motherless. You watch your victims through your
glasses as God might watch his mad universe. Your skill in directing
fire makes you what in peace times would be called a murderer. Curious!
You're glad, and yet at close quarters only in hot blood would you hurt
a man.

I'd been back for a little over an hour when I had to go forward again
to guide in some guns. The country was dazzlingly white in the
moonlight. As far as eye could see every yard was an old battlefield;
beneath the soft white fleece of snow lay countless unburied bodies.
Like frantic fingers tearing at the sky, all along the horizon, Hun
lights were shooting up and drifting across our front. Tap-tap-tappity
went the machine-guns; whoo-oo went the heavies, and they always stamp
like angry bulls. I had to come back by myself across the heroic
corruption which the snow had covered. All the way I asked myself why
was I not frightened. What has happened to me? Ghosts should walk here
if anywhere. Moreover, I know that I shall be frightened again when the
war is ended. Do you remember how you once offered me money to walk
through the Forest of Dean after dark, and I wouldn't? I wouldn't if
you offered it to me now. You remember Meredith's lines in "The Woods of
Westermain":

"All the eyeballs under hoods
Shroud you in their glare;
Enter these enchanted woods
You who dare."

Maybe what re-creates one for the moment is the British officer's