SCENES IN THE GREAT WAR
FIVE MONTHS AFTER
The next of the flashes as of lightning that
revealed the drama of the past 365 days came
to us at Christmas. The war had then been
going on five months, showing us many strange
and terrible sights, but nothing stranger and
more terrible than the changed aspect of warfare
itself. A battlefield had ceased to be a scene of
pomp and of personal prowess, with the charging
of galloping cavalry, the clash of glittering arms,
and the advancing and retiring of vast numbers
of soldiery. It was now a broad and desolate
waste, in which no human figure was anywhere
visible as far as the eye could reach—a monstrous
scar on the face of the globe, such as we see in
volcanic countries, only differing in the evidence
of design that came of long, parallel lines of
turned-up soil, which were the trenches wherein
hundreds of thousands of men lived under the
surface of the ground. Over this barren waste
there was almost perpetual smoke, and through
the smoke a deafening cannonading, which came
of the hurling through the air of scythes of steel,
called shells. Sometimes the shells were burying
themselves unbroken in the empty earth,
but too often they were scouring the trenches,
where they were bursting into jagged parts and
sending up showers of horrible fragments which
had once been the limbs of living men.
