“We’re made to live, not to be done in like this!”

“Men are made to be husbands, fathers—­men, what the devil!—­not beasts that hunt each other and cut each other’s throats and make themselves stink like all that.”

“And yet, everywhere—­everywhere—­there are beasts, savage beasts or smashed beasts.  Look, look!”

I shall never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men like a fit of madness.

I could see them agitated by this idea—­that to try to live one’s life on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and even an ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to make easy the inner life of every one.

“To live!”—­“All of us!”—­“You!”—­“Me!”

“No more war—­ah, no!—­it’s too stupid—­worse than that, it’s too—­”

For a finishing echo to their half-formed thought a saying came to the mangled and miscarried murmur of the mob from a filth-crowned face that I saw arise from the level of the earth—­“Two armies fighting each other—­that’s like one great army committing suicide!”

* * * * * *

“And likewise, what have we been for two years now?  Incredibly pitiful wretches, and savages as well, brutes, robbers, and dirty devils.”

“Worse than that!” mutters he whose only phrase it is.

“Yes, I admit it!”

In their troubled truce of the morning, these men whom fatigue had tormented, whom rain had scourged, whom night-long lightning had convulsed, these survivors of volcanoes and flood began not only to see dimly how war, as hideous morally as physically, outrages common sense, debases noble ideas and dictates all kind of crime, but they remembered how it had enlarged in them and about them every evil instinct save none, mischief developed into lustful cruelty, selfishness into ferocity, the hunger for enjoyment into a mania.

They are picturing all this before their eyes as just now they confusedly pictured their misery.  They are crammed with a curse which strives to find a way out and to come to light in words, a curse which makes them to groan and wail.  It is as if they toiled to emerge from the delusion and ignorance which soil them as the mud soils them; as if they will at last know why they are scourged.

“Well then?” clamors one.

“Ay, what then?” the other repeats, still more grandly.  The wind sets the flooded flats a-tremble to our eyes, and falling furiously on the human masses lying or kneeling and fixed like flagstones and grave-slabs, it wrings new shivering from them.

“There will be no more war,” growls a soldier, “when there is no more Germany.”