“P’raps, yes—­”

A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us.  When it had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain, seizing and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the long gaping trenches—­long as the grave of an army—­we began again.

“After all, what is it that makes the mass and the horror of war?”

“It’s the mass of the people.”

“But the people—­that’s us!”

He who had said it looked at me inquiringly.

“Yes,” I said to him, “yes, old boy, that’s true!  It’s with us only that they make battles.  It is we who are the material of war.  War is made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only.  It is we who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our numbers.  The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a wilderness of our making.  Yes, war is all of us, and all of us together.”

“Yes, that’s true.  It’s the people who are war; without them, there would be nothing, nothing but some wrangling, a long way off.  But it isn’t they who decide on it; it’s the masters who steer them.”

“The people are struggling to-day to have no more masters that steer them.  This war, it’s like the French Revolution continuing.”

“Well then, if that’s so, we’re working for the Prussians too?”

“It’s to be hoped so,” said one of the wretches of the plain.

“Oh, hell!” said the chasseur, grinding his teeth.  But he shook his head and added no more.

“We want to look after ourselves!  You shouldn’t meddle in other people’s business,” mumbled the obstinate snarler.

“Yes, you should!  Because what you call ‘other people,’ that’s just what they’re not—­they’re the same!”

“Why is it always us that has to march away for everybody?”

“That’s it!” said a man, and he repeated the words he had used a moment before.  “More’s the pity, or so much the better.”

“The people—­they’re nothing, though they ought to be everything,” then said the man who had questioned me, recalling, though he did not know it, an historic sentence of more than a century ago, but investing it at last with its great universal significance.  Escaped from torment, on all fours in the deep grease of the ground, he lifted his leper-like face and looked hungrily before him into infinity.

He looked and looked.  He was trying to open the gates of heaven.

* * * * * *

“The peoples of the world ought to come to an understanding, through the hides and on the bodies of those who exploit them one way or another.  All the masses ought to agree together.”

“All men ought to be equal.”

The word seems to come to us like a rescue.

“Equal—­yes—­yes—­there are some great meanings for justice and truth.  There are some things one believes in, that one turns to and clings to as if they were a sort of light.  There’s equality, above all.”