ed an enormous
tedium and discomfort. The flies became extremely troublesome, and my
little grave of a rifle pit was invaded by ants. I could not get up
or move about, for some one in the trees had got a mark on me. I kept
thinking of the dead Prussian down among the corn, and of the bitter
outcries of my own man. Damned foolery! It WAS damned foolery. But who
was to blame? How had we got to this? . . .

'Early in the afternoon an aeroplane tried to dislodge us with dynamite
bombs, but she was hit by bullets once or twice, and suddenly dived down
over beyond the trees.

'"From Holland to the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be
crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to inflict
irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to the pitch
of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake up." . . .

'Then the phrase changed itself in my mind. "Presently mankind will wake
up."

'I lay speculating just how many thousands of men there were among these
hundreds of thousands, whose spirits were in rebellion against all these
ancient traditions of flag and empire. Weren't we, perhaps, already in
the throes of the last crisis, in that darkest moment of a nightmare's
horror before the sleeper will endure no more of it--and wakes?

'I don't know how my speculations ended. I think they were not so
much ended as distracted by the distant thudding of the guns that were
opening fire at long range upon Namur.'

Section 7

But as yet Barnet had seen no more than the mildest beginnings of modern
warfare. So far he had taken part only in a little shooting. The bayonet
attack by which the advanced line was broken was made at a place called
Croix Rouge, more than twenty miles away, and that night under cover of
the darkness the rifle pits were abandoned and he got his company away
without further loss.

His regiment fell back unpressed behind the fortified lines between
Namur and Sedan, entrained at a station called Mettet, and was sent
northward by Antwerp and Rotterdam to Haarlem. Hence they marched into
North Holland. It was only after the march into Holland that he began to
realise the monstrous and catastrophic nature of the struggle in which
he was playing his undistinguished part.

He describes very pleasantly the journey through the hills and open land
of Brabant, the repeated crossing of arms of the Rhine, and the change
from the undulating scenery of Belgium to the flat, rich