present and to come--thirty millions of
soldiers. Another stammers, his eyes full of slaughter, "Two armies at
death-grips--that is one great army committing suicide."

"It should not have been," says the deep and hollow voice of the first
in the line. But another says, "It is the French Revolution beginning
again." "Let thrones beware!" says another's undertone.

The third adds, "Perhaps it is the last war of all." A silence follows,
then some heads are shaken in dissent whose faces have been blanched
anew by the stale tragedy of sleepless night--"Stop war? Stop war?
Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease."

Some one coughs, and then the Vision is swallowed up in the huge sunlit
peace of the lush meadows. In the rich colors of the glowing kine, the
black forests, the green fields and the blue distance, dies the
reflection of the fire where the old world burns and breaks. Infinite
silence engulfs the uproar of hate and pain from the dark swarmings of
mankind. They who have spoken retire one by one within themselves,
absorbed once more in their own mysterious malady.

But when evening is ready to descend within the valley, a storm breaks
over the mass of Mont Blanc. One may not go forth in such peril, for
the last waves of the storm-wind roll even to the great veranda, to
that harbor where they have taken refuge; and these victims of a great
internal wound encompass with their gaze the elemental convulsion.

They watch how the explosions of thunder on the mountain upheave the
level clouds like a stormy sea, how each one hurls a shaft of fire and
a column of cloud together into the twilight; and they turn their wan
and sunken faces to follow the flight of the eagles that wheel in the
sky and look from their supreme height down through the wreathing
mists, down to earth.

"Put an end to war?" say the watchers.--"Forbid the Storm!"

Cleansed from the passions of party and faction, liberated from
prejudice and infatuation and the tyranny of tradition, these watchers
on the threshold of another world are vaguely conscious of the
simplicity of the present and the yawning possibilities of the future.

The man at the end of the rank cries, "I can see crawling things down
there"--"Yes, as though they were alive"--"Some sort of plant,
perhaps"--"Some kind of men"--

And there amid the baleful glimmers of the storm, below the dark
disorder of the clouds that extend and unfurl over the earth like evil
spirits