st.

"Now think of it!" he said. "Fancy those two identical crowds yelling
things that are identical and yet opposite, these identical enemy
cries! What must the good God think about it all? I know well enough
that He knows everything, but even if He knows everything, He won't
know what to make of it."

"Rot!" cried the zouave.

"He doesn't care a damn for us, don't fret yourself."

"Anyway, what is there funny about it? That doesn't prevent people from
quarreling with each other--and don't they! And rifle-shots speak jolly
well the same language, don't they?"

"Yes," said the aviator, "but there's only one God. It isn't the
departure of prayers that I don't understand; it's their arrival."

The conversation dropped.

"There's a crowd of wounded laid out in there," the man with the dull
eyes said to me, "and I'm wondering all ways how they got 'em down
here. It must have been a terrible job, tumbling them in here."

Two Colonials, hard and lean, supporting each other like tipsy men,
butted into us and recoiled, looking on the ground for some place to
fall on.

"Old chap, in that trench I'm telling you of," the hoarse voice of one
was relating, "we were three days without rations, three full days
without anything--anything. Willy-nilly, we had to drink our own water,
and no help for it."

The other explained that once on a time he had cholera. "Ah, that's a
dirty business--fever, vomiting, colics; old man, I was ill with that
lot!"

"And then, too," suddenly growled the flying-man, still fierce to
pursue the answer to the gigantic conundrum, "what is this God thinking
of to let everybody believe like that that He's with them? Why does He
let us all--all of us--shout out side by side, like idiots and brutes,
'God is with us!'--'No, not at all, you're wrong; God is with us'?"

A groan arose from a stretcher, and for a moment fluttered lonely in
the silence as if it were an answer.

* * * * *

Then, "I don't believe in God," said a pain-racked voice; "I know He
doesn't exist--because of the suffering there is. They can tell us all
the clap-trap they like, and trim up all the words they can rind and
all they can make up, but to say that all this innocent suffering could
come from a perfect God, it's damned skull-stuffing."

"For my part," another of the men on the seat goes on, "I don't believe
in God because of the cold. I've seen men become corpses bit by bit,
just simply with