A polished missile is shoved into the gun.  A horrid bang—­the missile has disappeared, has simply gone.  Where it has gone, what it has done, nobody in the hut seems to care.  There is a telephone close by, but only numbers and formulae—­and perhaps an occasional rebuke—­come out of the telephone, in response to which the perspiring men make minute adjustments in the gun or in the next missile.

Of the target I am absolutely ignorant, and so are the perspiring men.  I am free to go forth and look for the target.  It is pointed out to me.  It may be a building or a group of buildings; it may be something else.  At best, it is nothing but a distant spot on a highly complex countryside.  I see a faint puff of smoke, seemingly as harmless as a feather momentarily floating.  And I think:  Can any reasonable person expect that those men with that noisy contrivance in the enclosed hut away back shall plant a mass of metal into that far-off tiny red patch of masonry lost in the vast landscape?  And, even if by chance they do, for what reason has that particular patch been selected?  What influence could its destruction have on the mighty course of the struggle? . . .  Thus it is that war seems vague and casual, because a mere fragment of it defeats the imagination, and the bits of even the fragment cannot be fitted together.  Why, I have stood in the first-line trench itself and heard a fusillade all round me, and yet have seen nothing and understood nothing of the action!

It is the same with the movements of troops.  For example, I slept in a town behind the front, in and I was wakened up—­not, as often, by an aeroplane—­but by a tremendous shaking and throbbing of the hotel.  This went on for a long time, from just after dawn till about six o’clock, when it stopped, only to recommence after a few minutes.  I got up, and found that, in addition to the hotel, the whole town was shaking and throbbing.  A regiment was passing through it in auto-buses.  Each auto-bus held about thirty men, and the vehicles rattled after one another at a distance of at most thirty yards.  The auto-buses were painted the colour of battleships, and were absolutely uniform except that some had permanent and some only temporary roofs, and some had mica windows and some only holes in the sides.  All carried the same number of soldiers, and in all the rifles were stacked in precisely the same fashion.  When one auto-bus stopped, all stopped, and the soldiers waved and smiled to girls at windows and in the street.  The entire town had begun its day.  No matter how early you arise in these towns, the town has always begun its day.