allows us to think more about eating than fighting, still we do not actually forget that we are in a battle line."
Ever over our heads goes on the precise and scientific struggle of the artillery. Packed elbow to elbow in these obscure galleries, one might be content to squat all day long, auditor of the magnificent orchestra of battle, were it not that one becomes so soon habituated to it that it is no longer magnificent. We hear the voices of cannon of all calibres and at all distances. We learn to read the score and distinguish the instruments. Near us are field batteries; far away are siege guns. Over all there is the unmistakable, sharp, metallic twang of the French 75, the whistle of its shell and the lesser report of its explosion.
And every now and then comes the bursting of a shell immediately overhead, and the rattle of its fragments on the roof of the bomb-proof dug-out. Think what it must have meant to this eager, ardent, pleasure-loving spirit to sit out, day after day, in a chill, sodden, verminous trench, a grand orchestral concert of this music of human madness!
The solitude of sentry-duty evidently comes to him as something of a relief. "It may," he says, "be all that is melancholy if the night is bad and the winter wind moans through the pines"; but it also "brings moments of exaltation, if the cloud-banks roll back, if the moon light breaks over the windless hills, or the heavens blaze with the beauty of the northern stars."
The sentinel has ample time for reflection. Alone under the stars, war in its cosmic rather than its moral aspect reveals itself to him.... He thrills with the sense of filling an appointed, necessary place in the conflict of hosts, and, facing the enemy's crest, above which the Great Bear wheels upward to the zenith, he feels, with a sublimity of enthusiasm that he has never before known, a kind of companionship with the stars.
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