...

A day came: his departure.

I got his things ready as I always did before a trip, from a list, with
my usual mania for taking along too many things. After filling his bag
with all the necessaries, I stowed a tiny bottle of my perfume in it, a
cigarette-case, his last birthday gift, some dried flowers, and our
baby's photograph. I childishly pictured his exclamation of delighted
surprise when he would remove his shirts and the picture would fall out.

Before he left the house, hardly recognizable in his uniform, he kissed
his son savagely and pressed him long and hard, bending low to hide his
tears.... On the way he spoke mostly of the child--commonplaces to
deaden his pain. "Don't let him be too much of a bother. You must be
strict with him, you know." I saw he was entrusting his share in his
survival to me, and it was better to avoid reference to a parting that
marched on to death.

Regiments were springing up on all sides, troops of men with innocent
eyes and faces shining with pride; sons, brothers, lovers, changed into
statues of men, in a confusion of brass bands, cheers, red and gold,
clashing of arms, and tramping of feet.

If only this were hell in its completeness! But he was not there. He had
left six days before without my being able to say good-bye to him.

There was the last kiss, the fixed, tangible second when you part for
good and the yard of space between you actually counts. You were two
bodies clasped, then you became only one body, two arms ... a soul
locked in a leaden coffin.

There were the wretched minutes when you summon all your illusions to
your assistance. "Nothing can possibly happen to him ... of course not
to _him_...."

I returned, dragging my misery like a chain. I was one of the vast herd
which fretted the surface of the earth like a canker, moulded and moved
by a deadly maniac hand.... Never before has there been such a herd.

Being a woman, I felt withdrawn from the herd, exactly as I had felt on
the first day of the war that humanity was cut in two--men and women.

I was impotent, curdled, set aside. Like the other women I passed by the
young men with orders to die and only a few days to live, though their
bearing was of men who had long to live. I passed by the other women,
useless flesh of the earth, faint-hearted flesh for grieving....

I went.... In another sense it was the herd that passed by, that
she-thing, in countless numbers, dancing bacchantes with hideous