hat it has not even shape; for aloft--above the
booming whirlwinds which are linked from east to west in the glow of
molten metal whose flashes are great as those of lighthouses, or in the
pallor of scattered electric constellations--hardly can one make out
the artificial outline of a mountain range, clapped upon space.

This immense city of immense low buildings, rectangular and dark, is
not a city. They are assaulting tanks, which a feeble internal gesture
sets in motion, ready for the rolling rush of their gigantic knee-caps.
These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fiery
entrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so much
as Pisa's tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, so
long that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays them
like the trumpets of Apocalypse--these are not cannon; they are
machine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out in
entire regions--and upon a country, if need be--mountains of
profundity.

In war, which was once like the open country and is now wholly like
towns--and even like one immense building--one hardly sees the men. On
the round-ways and the casemates, the footbridges and the movable
platforms, among the labyrinth of concrete caves, above the regiment
echelonned downwards in the gulf and enormously upright,--one sees a
haggard herd of wan and stooping men, men black and trickling, men
issuing from the peaty turf of night, men who came there to save their
country. They earthed themselves up in some zone of the vertical
gorges, and one sees them, in this more accursed corner than those
where the hurricane reels. One senses this human material, in the
cavities of those smooth grottoes, like Dante's guilty shades.
Infernal glimmers disclose ranged lines of them, as long as roads,
slender and trembling spaces of night, which daylight and even sunshine
leave befouled with darkness and cyclopean dirt. Solid clouds overhang
them and hatchet-charged hurricanes, and leaping flashes set fire every
second to the sky's iron-mines up above the damned whose pale faces
change not under the ashes of death. They wait, intent on the
solemnity and the significance of that vast and heavy booming against
which they are for the moment imprisoned. They will be down forever
around the spot where they are. Like others before them, they will be
shrouded in perfect oblivion. Their cries will rise above the earth no