“You’re right, we shall forget!  Not only the length of the big misery, which can’t be calculated, as you say, ever since the beginning, but the marches that turn up the ground and turn it again, lacerating your feet and wearing out your bones under a load that seems to grow bigger in the sky, the exhaustion until you don’t know your own name any more, the tramping and the inaction that grind you, the digging jobs that exceed your strength, the endless vigils when you fight against sleep and watch for an enemy who is everywhere in the night, the pillows of dung and lice—­we shall forget not only those, but even the foul wounds of shells and machine-guns, the mines, the gas, and the counter-attacks.  At those moments you’re full of the excitement of reality, and you’ve some satisfaction.  But all that wears off and goes away, you don’t know how and you don’t know where, and there’s only the names left, only the words of it, like in a dispatch.”

“That’s true what he says,” remarks a man, without moving his head in its pillory of mud.  When I was on leave, I found I’d already jolly well forgotten what had happened to me before.  There were some letters from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I was opening.  And yet in spite of that, I’ve forgotten also all the pain I’ve had in the war.  We’re forgetting-machines.  Men are things that think a little but chiefly forget.  That’s what we are.”

“Then neither the other side nor us’ll remember!  So much misery all wasted!”

This point of view added to the abasement of these beings on the shore of the flood, like news of a greater disaster, and humiliated them still more.

“Ah, if one did remember!” cried some one.

“If we remembered,” said another, “there wouldn’t be any more war.”

A third added grandly, “Yes, if we remembered, war would be less useless than it is.”

But suddenly one of the prone survivors rose to his knees, dark as a great bat ensnared, and as the mud dripped from his waving arms he cried in a hollow voice, “There must be no more war after this!”

In that miry corner where, still feeble unto impotence, we were beset by blasts of wind which laid hold on us with such rude strength that the very ground seemed to sway like sea-drift, the cry of the man who looked as if he were trying to fly away evoked other like cries:  “There must be no more war after this!”

The sullen or furious exclamations of these men fettered to the earth, incarnate of earth, arose and slid away on the wind like beating wings—­

“No more war!  No more war!  Enough of it!”

“It’s too stupid—­it’s too stupid,” they mumbled.

“What does it mean, at the bottom of it, all this?—­all this that you can’t even give a name to?”

They snarled and growled like wild beasts on that sort of ice-floe contended for by the elements, in their dismal disguise of ragged mud.  So huge was the protest thus rousing them in revolt that it choked them.