, what is it?"

"Please take my kodak!"

Singley himself arranged the exposure and handed the camera to the
captain, saying: "There, it is set at one twentieth of a second. Now
please take my picture-- Thank you, that's all right! And now you can
have me removed to the hospital!"

Before the men came to fetch him, Singley managed to add to his list:

No. 848. Our war-correspondent, Singley, mortally wounded by a
Japanese shell. Hail Columbia!

Then he closed his book and put it in his breast pocket. Five minutes
later two ambulance men carried him off to have his wounds attended to,
and in the evening he was conveyed to the hospital.

A week later Captain Lange's snapshot of the war-correspondent was
paraded in the _New York Herald_ as the dramatic close of Singley's
journalistic career. In his way he, too, had been a hero. He died in the
hospital at Salubria.

He could claim the credit of having made the war plain to those at home.
Or was that not the war after all? Were the black shadows on the
photographic plate anything more than what is left of a flower after the
botanist has pressed the faded semblance of its former self between the
leaves of his collection? Certainly not much more.

No, that is not war. Just a bursting--silently bursting shell, the
scattering of a company--that is not war.

Thousands of bursting shells, the howls of the whizzing bullets, the
constant nerve-racking crashing and roaring overhead, the deafening
cracking of splitting iron everywhere--that is war. And accompanying it
all the hopeless sensation that this will never, never stop, that it
will go on like this forever, until one's thoughts are dulled by some
terrible, cruel, incomprehensible, demoralizing force. Those bounding
puffs of smoke everywhere on the ground, rifle shots which have been
aimed too short and every one of which-- That abominable sharp singing
as of a swarm of mosquitoes, buzz, buzz, like the buzzing of angry
hornets continually knocking their heads against a window-pane. Bang!
That hit a stone. Bang! two inches nearer, then--"Aim carefully, fire
slowly!" calls the lieutenant in a hoarse, dry voice. You aim carefully
and fire slowly and reload. Buzz-- And then you fume with a fierce
uncontrollable rage because you must aim carefully and fire slowly. And
the whole space in front of the trenches is covered with infantry
bullets glittering in the sunlight. Will it ever stop? Never! A day like
that has a h