Some people get accustomed to the noise, but others never.  Every time a battery fired simultaneously one of the men who were with me, a hard, tough type of mechanic, shrank and ducked his head with an expression of agonized horror.  He confessed to me that it “knocked his nerves to pieces.”  Three such men out of six or seven had to be invalided home in one week.  One of them had a crise de nerfs, which nearly killed him.  Yet it was not fear which was the matter with them.  Intellectually they were brave men and coerced themselves into joining many perilous adventures.  It was the intolerable strain upon the nervous system that made wrecks of them.  Some men are attacked with a kind of madness in the presence of shells.  It is what a French friend of mine called la folie des obus.  It is a kind of spiritual exultation which makes them lose self-consciousness and be caught up, as it were, in the delirium of those crashing, screaming things.  In the hottest quarter of an hour in Dixmude one of my friends paced about aimlessly with a dreamy look in his eyes.  I am sure he had not the slightest idea where he was or what he was doing.  I believe he was “outside himself,” to use a good old-fashioned phrase.  And at Antwerp, when a convoy of British ambulances escaped with their wounded through a storm of shells, one man who had shown a strange hankering for the heart of the inferno, stepped off his car, and said:  “I must go back, I must go back!  Those shells call to me.”  He went back and has never been heard of again.

Greater than one’s fear, more overmastering in one’s interest is this shell-fire.  It is frightfully interesting to watch the shrapnel bursting near bodies of troops, to see the shells kicking up the earth, now in this direction and now in that; to study a great building gradually losing its shape and falling into ruins; to see how death takes its toll in an indiscriminate way—­smashing a human being into pulp a few yards away and leaving oneself alive, or scattering a roadway with bits of raw flesh which a moment ago was a team of horses, or whipping the stones about a farmhouse with shrapnel bullets which spit about the crouching figures of soldiers who stare at these pellets out of sunken eyes.  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.