istance from us the battle-field has thundered unceasingly
for days. Like a noisy, complicated mechanism which turns out the
products of its internal activity, the stupid machine of war throws out,
from minute to minute, bleeding men. We pick them up, and here they are,
swathed in bandages. They have been crushed in the twinkling of an eye;
and now we shall have to ask months and years to repair or palliate the
damage.

How silent they are this evening! And how it makes one's heart ache
to look at them! Here is Bourreau, with the brutal name and the gentle
nature, who never utters a complaint, and whom a single bullet has
deprived of sight for ever. Here is Bride, whom we fear to touch, so
covered is he with bandages, but who looks at us with touching, liquid
eyes, his mind already wandering. Here is Lerouet, who will not see next
morning dawn over the pine-trees, and who has a gangrened wound near
his heart. And the others, all of whom I know by their individual
misfortunes.

How difficult it is to realise what they were, all these men who a year
ago, were walking in streets, tilling the land, or writing in an office.
Their present is too poignant. Here they lie on the ground, like some
fair work of art defaced. Behold them! The creature par excellence has
received a great outrage, an outrage it has wrought upon itself.

We are ignorant of their past. But have they a future? I consider these
innocent victims in the tragic majesty of the hour, and I feel ashamed
of living and breathing freely among them.

Poor, poor brothers! What could one do for you which would not be
insufficient, unworthy, mediocre? We can at least give up everything and
devote ourselves heart and soul to our holy and exacting work.

But no! round the beds on which your solitary drama is enacted, men are
still taking part in a sinister comedy. Every kind of folly, the most
ignoble and also the most imbecile passions, pursue their enterprises
and their satisfactions over your heads.

Neither the four corpses we buried this morning, nor your daily agonies
will disarm these appetites, suspend these calculations, and destroy
these ambitions the development and fruition of which even your
martyrdom, may be made to serve.

I will spend the whole evening among my wounded, and we will talk
together, gently, of their misery; it will please them, and they will
make me forget the horrible atmosphere of discussion that reigns here.

Alas! during th