your baggage; here you must wait.  We could look through the station as through the ribs of a skeleton.  The stillness of it under the rain and under the echoes of the tireless artillery was horrible.  It was the most unnatural, ghostly, ghastly railway station one could imagine.  As within the station, so on the platforms.  All the glass of the shelters for passengers was broken to little bits; the ironwork thickly encrusted.  The signals were unutterably forlorn in their ruin.  And on the lines themselves rampant vegetation had grown four feet high—­a conquering jungle.  The defence of German soil is a mighty and a far-reaching affair.  This was on July 7th, 1915.

IV At Grips

I have before referred to the apparent vagueness and casualness of war on its present scarcely conceivable scale.  When you are with a Staff officer, you see almost everything.  I doubt not that certain matters are hidden from you; but, broadly speaking, you do see all that is to be seen.  Into the mind of the General, which conceals the strategy that is to make history, of course you cannot peer.  The General is full of interesting talk about the past and about the present, but about the future he breathes no word.  If he is near the centre of the front he will tell you blandly, in answer to your question, that a great movement may not improbably be expected at the wings.  If he is at either of the wings he will tell you blandly that a great movement may not improbably be expected at the centre.  You are not disappointed at his attitude, because you feel when putting them that such questions as yours deserve such answers as his.  But you are assuredly disappointed at not being able to comprehend even the present—­what is going on around you, under your eyes, deafening your ears.

For example, I hear the sound of guns.  I do not mean the general sound of guns, which is practically continuous round the horizon, but the particular sound of some specific group of guns.  I ask about them.  Sometimes even Staff officers may hesitate before deciding whether they are enemy guns or French guns.  As a rule, the civilian distinguishes an enemy shot by the sizzling, affrighting sound of the projectile as it rushes through the air towards him; whereas the French projectile, rushing away from him, is out of hearing before the noise of the gun’s explosion has left his ears.  But I may be almost equidistant between a group of German and a group of French guns.

When I have learnt what the guns are and their calibre, and, perhaps, even their approximate situation on the large-scale Staff map, I am not much nearer the realisation of them.  Actually to find them might be half a day’s work, and when I have found them I have simply found several pieces of mechanism each hidden in a kind of hut, functioning quite privately and disconnectedly by the aid of a few perspiring men.  The affair is not like shooting at anything.