On the afternoon of the following day, the company is detailed for barrack drill. We are lying on our stomachs in the barrack-yard, and are being drilled in taking aim and firing lying down.
In front of me on the barrack wall over there they have painted targets. Ring targets, head targets, chest targets. Three hundred yards. I take pointblank aim, and press the trigger. "Square in the chest." That ought to count as a bull's-eye.
Wonder how many clips of cartridges am I going to get through?
Wonder if there will be a bull's-eye among them?
If every man of those millions they are putting into the field against the enemy fires about a hundred cartridges, and there is one bull's-eye in every hundred, that works out at ... that amounts to ... and I can't help smiling at this neat sum in arithmetic ... then the answer is no one at all. That is a merry sum.
I ram in another clip of dummy cartridges.
How quickly and smoothly that's done. One--two seconds, and five cartridges are set in your magazine. Every one of them, if need be, can penetrate six men; it can penetrate palisades and trees; it can penetrate earthworks and stone walls. There is practically no cover left against this dainty little missile, against this little pointed cone.
And what a wonderful bit of mechanism this Mauser rifle is. How wretchedly badly off they were in 1870-71 with their rattletrap needle guns. A single feeble bullet at a time, and after you had fired it came the long, complicated business of reloading.
And yet the war accounted for well over a hundred thousand French and German dead.
I wonder how many dead this war will ac count for? If only every fifth man is left on the field, and if another fifth comes home invalided ... what will its harvest amount to then?
The whole of both countrysides are at this moment covered with soldiers lying flat, and all of them with their rifles at the ready, and all of them pointing the death-bearing barrels at one another, are perfecting themselves in the art of hitting the heart.
But behind them the guns are swinging up. The gunners are jumping down and dragging the trail round. They are already aligned, and a thousand black mouths are gaping uncannily toward the heavens.