suffering and forget all about
it. "We've seen too much, and everything we saw was too much. We are not
built to take all that in. It escapes from us in every direction; we are
too small. We are forgetting-machines. Men are beings which think
little; above all, they forget." In Napoleon's day every soldier had a
marshal's baton in his knapsack, and every soldier had in his brain the
ambitious image of the little Corsican officer. There are no longer any
individuals now, there is a human mass which is itself lost amid
elemental forces. "More than six thousand miles of French trenches, more
than six thousand miles of such miseries or of worse; and the French
front is only one-eighth of the whole." Instinctively the narrator is
compelled to borrow his images from the rough mythology of primitive
peoples, or from cosmic convulsions. He speaks of "rivers of wounded
torn from the bowels of the earth which bleeds and rots
unendingly"--"glaciers of corpses"--"gloomy immensities of Styx"--"Valley
of Jehoshaphat"--prehistoric spectacles. What does the individual man
amount to in all this? What does his suffering mean? "What's the use
of complaining?" says one wounded man to another. "That's what war is,
not the battles, but the terrible unnatural weariness; water up to the
middle, mud, filth, infinite monotony of wretchedness, interrupted by
acute tragedies."--At intervals, human groans, profound shudders, issue
from the silence and the night.

Here and there, in the course of this long narration, peaks emerge from
the grey and bloody uniformity: the attack ("under fire"); "the field
hospital"; "the dawn." I wish I had space to quote the admirable picture
of the men awaiting the order to attack; they are motionless; an assumed
calm masks such dreams, such fears, such farewell thoughts! Without any
illusions, without enthusiasm, without excitement, "despite the busy
propaganda of the authorities, without intoxication either material or
moral," fully aware of what they are doing, they await the signal to
hurl themselves "once more into this madman's role imposed on each of
them by the madness of mankind." Then comes the "headlong rush to the
abyss," where blindly, amid shell-splinters hissing like red-hot iron
plunged into water, amid the stench of sulphur, they race forward. Next
comes the butchery in the trenches, where "at first the men do not know
what to do," but where a frenzy soon seizes them, so that "they hardly
recognise