“Er ist todt!” (He’s dead) says one of the men, beginning to cry.  The others settle themselves again to sleep.  The weeper goes to sleep as he weeps.

Other soldiers have come, stumbling, gripped in sudden halts like tipsy men, or gliding along like worms, to take sanctuary here; and we sleep all jumbled together in the common grave.

* * * * * *

Waking, Paradis and I look at each other, and remember.  We return to life and daylight as in a nightmare.  In front of us the calamitous plain is resurrected, where hummocks vaguely appear from their immersion, the steel-like plain that is rusty in places and shines with lines and pools of water, while bodies are strewn here and there in the vastness like foul rubbish, prone bodies that breathe or rot.

Paradis says to me, “That’s war.”

“Yes, that’s it,” he repeats in a far-away voice, “that’s war.  It’s not anything else.”

He means—­and I am with him in his meaning—­“More than attacks that are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife, War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth.  It is befouled faces and tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth.  It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken, by poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet glittering like silver, nor the bugle’s chanticleer call to the sun!”

Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and growled, “D’you remember the woman in the town where we went about a bit not so very long ago?  She talked some drivel about attacks, and said, ‘How beautiful they must be to see!’”

A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a cloak, raised his bead out of the filthy background in which it was sunk, and cried, ’Beautiful?  Oh, hell!  It’s just as if an ox were to say, ’What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle driven forward to the slaughter-house!’” He spat out mud from his besmeared mouth, and his unburied face was like a beast’s.

“Let them say, ‘It must be,’” he sputtered in a strange jerky voice, grating and ragged; “that’s all right.  But beautiful!  Oh, hell!”

Writhing under the idea, he added passionately, “It’s when they say things like that that they hit us hardest of all!” He spat again, hut exhausted by his effort he fell back in his bath of mud, and laid his head in his spittle.

* * * * * *

Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide unspeakable landscape. and looking steadily on it repeated his sentence, ’War is that.  It is that everywhere.  What are we, we chaps, and what’s all this here?  Nothing at all.  All we can see is only a speck.  You’ve got to remember that this morning there’s three thousand kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse.”