["Bury the Dead"] is based on a conceit of originality and power. Six men just laid in their new dug graves by a weary detachment of fellow-soldiers rise slowly to their feet and with quiet persistence refuse to submit to the final indignity—dirt on their faces. They are dead all right. There is no doubt about that. But they won't be buried and they won't lie still no matter how anxious the living may be to have them covered, and forgotten, and quiet at last.
The men ordered to bury the rebellious corpses are struck with terror. So, too, are the captain who comes to investigate, the general who appeals to their sense of duty, and the six women who are brought as a last resort to give their various reasons why the dead, once they are dead, should cease from troubling those living to whom alone the earth belongs. But terrified though they all are, they are not really surprised. Something of the sort, they knew, was bound to happen. Too many people have been killed and too many have been buried. Earth herself has rebelled. She will not receive any more of her children dead before their time, and dead men will submit no longer even to death itself. One of the six has a vision of a better world. The other five merely know that they have never seen nor heard nor felt what they were destined to see and to hear and to feel. They are dead and it can't be helped. But the living must not be permitted to forget them or to suppose that they found it sweet and proper to die. "De profundis clamavi."
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