uled faces and tattered flesh,
it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the
ravenous earth. It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken, by
poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet glittering like
silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer call to the sun!"

Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and
growled, "D'you remember the woman in the town where we went about a
bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and
said, 'How beautiful they must be to see!'"

A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a
cloak, raised his bead out of the filthy background in which it was
sunk, and cried, "Beautiful? Oh, hell! It's just as if an ox were to
say, 'What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle driven
forward to the slaughter-house!'" He spat out mud from his besmeared
mouth, and his unburied face was like a beast's.

"Let them say, 'It must be,'" he sputtered in a strange jerky voice,
grating and ragged; "that's all right. But beautiful! Oh, hell!"

Writhing under the idea, he added passionately, "It's when they say
things like that that they hit us hardest of all!" He spat again, hut
exhausted by his effort he fell back in his bath of mud, and laid his
head in his spittle.

* * * * *

Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide
unspeakable landscape, and looking steadily on it repeated his
sentence, "War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we chaps,
and what's all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is only a
speck. You've got to remember that this morning there's three thousand
kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse."

"And then," said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognize
even by his voice, "to-morrow it begins again. It began again the day
before yesterday, and all the days before that!"

With an effort as if he was tearing the ground, the chasseur dragged
his body out of the earth where he had molded a depression like an
oozing coffin, and sat in the hole. He blinked his eyes and tried to
shake the balance of mud from his face, and said, "We shall come out of
it again this time. And who knows, p'raps we shall come out of it again
to-morrow! Who knows?"

Paradis, with his back bent under mats of earth and clay, was trying to
convey his idea that the war cannot be imagined or measured in terms of
time and s