Peter had pitied the from a hill, having stood with a battery as it sprayed the Austrian lines. He had watched the Austrian machines pouring steel upon the Russians also. There had been emotion; he had felt the shame of it powerfully on this very morning; but now he reflected, with a touch of , that his pity had not been adequate. At the present he belonged to the sacrifice. The process was reversed; the globe of his experience shortly to be made complete. He would have the effects of light and darkness from the vantage of the and the upon.  
Peter had never been actually down among men before. He had watched men, studied them sincerely, passed them in the street, reflected upon their problems. At the same time, his personal had always been away from men, his a different purpose, a different aim. He was one now, one in the massed destiny of the command, one to obey. Only by falling could he be free from this extraordinary authority of the army.
 
Moreover, he felt that the this authority was not of the human but of the tiger.
 
He might have thought of all this before, as he had thought of death as one thing for the outsider and a different thing for the little lens-maker he liked so well. But this was experience, not . He was an atom of the charge. The army authority disrupted his moral sense. It bound and gagged him. No imagination could have his vital and creative force as this adventure, in which he was caught up like a chip and carried forward in a rush of animal power. Fear had no part of his revulsion, but the break of his will. It was not like a man drowning, in an insensible element; this that carried him had a consciousness and it was unclean.
 
He saw that the rankers leaned on each other; that there was not yet in the peasant faces about him a single separate individual relation to the . These men might have, seen others fall by the hundreds, but their faith was in the command, their law its law. Peter saw that they were in a sense like men parading through city streets, who endure the eyes of the crowds because they are part of a line. It was the eternal illusion of numbers again—the elbow brush, the heat, the breath, the muttering of men—this atmosphere that the military machine breathed. alone, most of them would have fallen from fear.
 
He smelled the unwashed crowd. Under all the bronze that life in the open had given the command was the lardy look of earth-born men, close-to-the-ground men; these were the that put on pounds and size, the of a mind, the ignition of soul perhaps in moments such as now—and pass to the earth again. Yet the history of Europe was to be written upon a surface like this; this, the soil of the future. It was close to , but as yet undefiled by man. This was the newest product of earth, the new terrific of the North that had alarmed lower Europe; these were the peasant millions as yet unfathered, strong as yet only as bulls are strong, gregarians, almost without memory; their terror, pain, passion, hope, genius not individual yet, but in the solution of the crowds.
 
Peter Mowbray's shock was the loss of the sense of self; his battle to retain this sense. He seemed to fuse in the heat, the vast solution draining his . He could have given himself to the white fire of a group of men like Spenski, Abel, Fallows, Poltneck, perhaps—but to give himself to this.... They were stretching out now as skirmishers, the crush ended. Entire figures of men could be seen, instead of necks, beards, and shoulders. Samarc gripped his arm, the other hand pointing to a little red-haired boy who ran, , sped on again, halted to look, in the true squirrel fashion of advance, which is the approved procedure of skirmishers. He talked to himself, appeared lost in absorption, reminded one continually of Spenski when his face was averted—and was just one of the miles of infantry.
 
Their faces looked cold now; a part of the gray tone so often observed. The officers fought to stretch them out. Every line of fear that the human mouth can express Peter saw. Now the drum of the Austrian pieces. It was not as they had heard it in the heights, but like an encore at first—as if some tremendous mass of men in a wooden gallery had started a of feet. The valley the volleys; the actual steel was not heard until it neared like a rain ; indeed it found their lines before they heard the murderous cutting of the air. The Austrian gunners were placed for enfilading, so that a fraction of point gave them force and a wide swath in the ranks.
 
Peter saw the little red head cocked forward as if to listen to the nearing of steel.
 
Now men were down and crying out. The fire was like that of a hostile concentrating its volley upon a little knot of soldiers—the air was whipped, wild with missiles. Supernatural fear was the answer from the very souls of men. Their prayer (in Mowbray's conception) was not for life, but for cessation. Yet the machines held them with infernal leisure as one holds the stream from a garden hose to a spot of clay clinging to .
 
In all the soldiers met the , with every answering sound. Then falling, rising, crawling, the remnant went back. It was not pain nor death nor wounds that mattered—but the hurtling in the air, the plague of steel....
 
It stopped. Peter lay an instant. He felt no hurt. He was down because one could not stand in that sw............