low of
eighteen, still almost a child, was full of a dull despair. Above his
head, above the shadows of these long vaulted ways, of this rat-run
through which the monster of metal whirled, all swarming with human
masks--was Paris, the snow, the cold January darkness, the nightmare of
life and of death--the war.

The war! Four years ago it was, the war had come to stay. It had weighed
heavily on his adolescent years. It had caught him by surprise in that
morally critical period when the growing boy, disquieted by the
awakening of his feelings, discovers with a shock the existence of
blind, bestial, crushing forces in life whose prey he is and that
without having asked to live at all. And if he happens to be delicate in
character, tender of heart and frail as to body in the way Pierre was,
he experiences a disgust and horror which he does not dare confide to
others for all these brutalities, these nastinesses, all this nonsense
of fruitful and devouring nature--this breeding sow that gobbles up her
litter of pigs.

In every growing youth between sixteen and eighteen there is a bit of
the soul of Hamlet. Don't ask him to understand the war! (All right for
you men, who have had your fill!) He has all he can do to understand
life and forgive its existence. As a rule he digs himself in with his
dream and with the arts, until the time comes when he has got used to
his incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing passage from
larva to winged insect. What a need he has for peace and meditation
during these April days so full of the trouble of maturing life! But
they come after him to the bottom of his burrow, look him up, drag him
from the dark while still so tender in his new-made skin. They toss him
into the raw air amongst the hard human race whose follies and hatreds
he is expected at the very first moment to accept without understanding
them and, not understanding, to atone for them.

Pierre had been called to military service along with those of his own
class, boys of sixteen to eighteen. Within six months his country would
be needing his flesh. The war claimed him. Six months of respite. Six
months! Oh, if one could only stop thinking at all from this time to
that! Just to stay in this underground tunnel! Never see cruel daylight
any more!...

He plunged deeper into his gloom along with the flying train and closed
his eyes....

When he opened them again--a few steps away, but separated by the bodies
of two