isguise of ragged mud.
So huge was the protest thus rousing them in revolt that it choked them.

"We're made to live, not to be done in like this!"

"Men are made to be husbands, fathers--men, what the devil!--not beasts
that hunt each other and cut each other's throats and make themselves
stink like all that."

"And yet, everywhere--everywhere--there are beasts, savage beasts or
smashed beasts. Look, look!"

I shall never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the
water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all
sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across
the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above
those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the
vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly
shook these men like a fit of madness.

I could see them agitated by this idea--that to try to live one's life
on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and even an
ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to make easy
the inner life of every one.

"To live!"--"All of us!"--"You!"--"Me!"

"No more war--ah, no!--it's too stupid--worse than that, it's too--"

For a finishing echo to their half-formed thought a saying came to the
mangled and miscarried murmur of the mob from a filth-crowned face that
I saw arise from the level of the earth--"Two armies fighting each
other--that's like one great army committing suicide!"

* * * * *

"And likewise, what have we been for two years now? Incredibly pitiful
wretches, and savages as well, brutes, robbers, and dirty devils."

"Worse than that!" mutters he whose only phrase it is.

"Yes, I admit it!"

In their troubled truce of the morning, these men whom fatigue had
tormented, whom rain had scourged, whom night-long lightning had
convulsed, these survivors of volcanoes and flood began not only to see
dimly how war, as hideous morally as physically, outrages common sense,
debases noble ideas and dictates all kind of crime, but they remembered
how it had enlarged in them and about them every evil instinct save
none, mischief developed into lustful cruelty, selfishness into
ferocity, the hunger for enjoyment into a mania.

They are picturing all this before their eyes as just now they
confusedly pictured their misery. They are crammed with a curse which
strives to find a way out and to come to light in