This sense of being under a black spell I found expressed by other men, and by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one of them in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: “This war was not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell.” This belief was due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern warfare, in which gunfire is at so long a range that shellfire has the quality of natural and elemental powers of death⁠—like thunderbolts⁠—and men killed twenty miles behind the lines while walking over sunny fields or in busy villages had no thought of a human enemy desiring their individual death.