Two Colonials, hard and lean, supporting each other like tipsy men, butted into us and recoiled, looking on the ground for some place to fall on.

“Old chap, in that trench I’m telling you of,” the hoarse voice of one was relating, “we were three days without rations, three full days without anything—­anything.  Willy-nilly, we had to drink our own water, and no help for it.”

The other explained that once on a time he had cholera.  “Ah, that’s a dirty business—­fever, vomiting, colics; old man, I was ill with that lot!”

“And then, too,” suddenly growled the flying-man, still fierce to pursue the answer to the gigantic conundrum, “what is this God thinking of to let everybody believe like that that He’s with them?  Why does He let us all—­all of us—­shout out side by side, like idiots and brutes, ’God is with us!’—­’No, not at all, you’re wrong; God is with us’?”

A groan arose from a stretcher, and for a moment fluttered lonely in the silence as if it were an answer.

* * * * * *

Then, “I don’t believe in God,” said a pain-racked voice; “I know He doesn’t exist—­because of the suffering there is.  They can tell us all the clap-trap they like, and trim up all the words they can rind and all they can make up, but to say that all this innocent suffering could come from a perfect God, it’s damned skull-stuffing.”

“For my part,” another of the men on the seat goes on, “I don’t believe in God because of the cold.  I’ve seen men become corpses bit by bit, just simply with cold.  If there was a God of goodness, there wouldn’t be any cold.  You can’t get away from that.”

“Before you can believe in God, you’ve got to do away with everything there is.  So we’ve got a long way to go!”

Several mutilated men, without seeing each other, combine in head-shakes of dissent “You’re right,” says another, “you’re right.”

These men in ruins, vanquished in victory, isolated and scattered, have the beginnings of a revelation.  There come moments in the tragedy of these events when men are not only sincere, but truth-telling, moments when you see that they and the truth are face to face.

“As for me,” said a new speaker, “if I don’t believe in God, it’s—­” A fit of coughing terribly continued his sentence.

When the fit passed and his cheeks were purple and wet with tears, some one asked him, “Where are you wounded?”

“I’m not wounded; I’m ill.”

“Oh, I see!” they said, in a tone which meant “You’re not interesting.”

He understood, and pleaded the cause of his illness: 

“I’m done in, I spit blood.  I’ve no strength left, and it doesn’t come back, you know, when it goes away like that.”

“Ah, ah!” murmured the comrades—­wavering, but secretly convinced all the same of the inferiority of civilian ailments to wounds.

In resignation he lowered his head and repeated to himself very quietly, “I can’t walk any more; where would you have me go?”