to get
him well soon. But his whole attitude betrays indifference. He smokes a
great deal, and rarely speaks. He has no reason to despair, and he knows
that he can resume his ordinary life. But familiarity with Death, which
sometimes makes life seem so precious, occasionally ends by producing a
distaste for it, or rather a deep weariness of it.

X

A whole nation, ten whole nations are learning to live in Death's
company. Humanity has entered the wild beast's cage, and sits there with
the patient courage of the lion-tamer.

Men of my country, I learn to know you better every day, and from
having looked you in the face at the height of your sufferings, I have
conceived a religious hope for the future of our race. It is mainly
owing to my admiration for your resignation, your native goodness, your
serene confidence in better times to come that I can still believe in
the moral future of the world.

At the very hour when the most natural instinct inclines the world to
ferocity, you preserve, on your beds of suffering, a beauty, a purity of
outlook which goes far to atone for the monstrous crime. Men of France,
your simple grandeur of soul redeems humanity from its greatest crime,
and raises it from its deep abyss.

We are told how you bear the misery of the battle-field, how in the
discouraging cold and mud, you await the hour of your cruel duty, how
you rush forward to meet the mortal blow, through the unimaginable
tumult of peril.

But when you come here, there are further sufferings in store for you;
and I know with what courage you endure them.

The doors of the Chateau close on a new life for you, a life that is
also one of perpetual peril and contest. I help you in this contest, and
I see how gallantly you wage it.

Not a wrinkle in your faces escapes me. Not one of your pains, not one
of the tremors of your lacerated flesh. And I write them all down, just
as I note your simple words, your cries, your sighs of hope, as I also
note the expression of your faces at the solemn hour when man speaks no
more.

Not one of your words leaves me unmoved; there is not one of your
actions which is not worthy of record. All must contribute to the
history of our great ordeal.

For it is not enough to give oneself up to the sacred duty of succour.
It is not enough to apply the beneficent knife to the wound, or to
change the dressings skilfully and carefully.

It is also my mission to record the history of those who