There is a beauty in it too, for the aestheticism of a Nero.  Beautiful and terrible were the fires of those Belgian towns which I watched under a star-strewn sky.  There was a pure golden glow, as of liquid metal, beneath the smoke columns and the leaping tongues of flame.  And many colours were used to paint this picture of war, for the enemy used shells with different coloured fumes, by which I was told they studied the effect of their fire.  Most vivid is the ordinary shrapnel, which tears a rent through the black volumes of smoke rolling over a smouldering town with a luminous sphere of electric blue.  Then from the heavier guns come dense puff-balls of tawny orange, violet, and heliotrope, followed by fleecy little cumuli of purest white.  One’s mind is absorbed in this pageant of shell-fire, and with a curious intentness, with that rigidity of nervous and muscular force which I have described, one watches the zone of fire sweeping nearer to oneself, bursting quite close, killing people not very far away.

Men who have been in the trenches under heavy shell-fire, sometimes for as long as three days, come out of their torment like men who have been buried alive.  They have the brownish, ashen colour of death.  They tremble as through anguish.  They are dazed and stupid for a time.  But they go back.  That is the marvel of it.  They go back day after day, as the Belgians went day after day.  There is no fun in it, no sport, none of that heroic adventure which used perhaps—­gods know—­to belong to warfare when men were matched against men, and not against unapproachable artillery.  This is their courage, stronger than all their fear.  There is something in us, even divine pride of manhood, a dogged disregard of death, though it comes from an unseen enemy out of a smoke-wracked sky, like the thunderbolts of the gods, which makes us go back, though we know the terror of it.  For honour’s sake men face again the music of that infernal orchestra, and listen with a deadly sickness in their hearts to the song of the shell screaming the French word for kill, which is tue! tue!

It was at night that I used to see the full splendour of the war’s infernal beauty.  After a long day in the fields travelling back in the repeated journeys to the station of Fortem, where the lightly wounded men used to be put on a steam tramway for transport to the Belgian hospitals, the ambulances would gather their last load and go homeward to Furnes.  It was quite dark then, and towards nine o’clock the enemy’s artillery would slacken fire, only the heavy guns sending out long-range shots.  But five towns or more were blazing fiercely in the girdle of fire, and the sky throbbed with the crimson glare of their furnaces, and tall trees to which the autumn foliage clung would be touched with light, so that their straight trunks along a distant highway stood like ghostly sentinels.  Now and again, above one of the burning towns a shell would burst as though the enemy were not content with their fires and would smash them into smaller fuel.