Now, the sky is all overcast.  Low down it is armored in steely blue by great clouds.  Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is crossed by enormous sweepings of wet mist.  The weather is worsening, and more rain on the way.  The end of the tempest and the long trouble is not yet.

“We shall say to ourselves,” says one, “’After all, why do we make war?’ We don’t know at all why, but we can say who we make it for.  We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated, it’s for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and shops—­and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions.”

“Listen!” some one broke in suddenly.

We hold our peace, and hear afar the sound of guns.  Yonder, the growling is agitating the gray strata of the sky, and the distant violence breaks feebly on our buried ears.  All around us, the waters continue to sap the earth and by degrees to ensnare its heights.

“It’s beginning again.”

Then one of us says, “Ah, look what we’ve got against us!”

Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways’ discussion of their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly sketching.  It is not only the peril and pain, the misery of the moment, whose endless beginning they see again.  It is the enmity of circumstances and people against the truth, the accumulation of privilege and ignorance, of deafness and unwillingness, the taken sides, the savage conditions accepted, the immovable masses, the tangled lines.

And the dream of fumbling thought is continued in another vision, in which everlasting enemies emerge from the shadows of the past and stand forth in the stormy darkness of to-day.

* * * * * *

Here they are.  We seem to see them silhouetted against the sky, above the crests of the storm that beglooms the world—­a cavalcade of warriors, prancing and flashing, the charges that carry armor and plumes and gold ornament, crowns and swords.  They are burdened with weapons; they send forth gleams of light; magnificent they roll.  The antiquated movements of the warlike ride divide the clouds like the painted fierceness of a theatrical scene.

And far above the fevered gaze of them who are upon the ground, whose bodies are layered with the dregs of the earth and the wasted fields, the phantom cohort flows from the four corners of the horizon, drives back the sky’s infinity and hides its blue deeps.

And they are legion.  They are not only the warrior caste who shout as they fight and have joy of it, not only those whom universal slavery has clothed in magic power, the mighty by birth, who tower here and there above the prostration of the human race and will take their sudden stand by the scales of justice when they think they see great profit to gain; not only these, but whole multitudes who minister consciously or unconsciously to their fearful privilege.