sleeper. As though the
corpse was listening they clamored--"No! To win isn't the object. It
isn't those others we've got to get at--it's war."

"Can't you see that we've got to finish with war? If we've got to begin
again some day, all that's been done is no good. Look at it there!--and
it would be in vain. It would be two or three years or more of wasted
catastrophe."

* * * * *

"Ah, my boy, if all we've gone through wasn't the end of this great
calamity! I value my life; I've got my wife, my family, my home around
them; I've got schemes for my life afterwards, mind you. Well, all the
same, if this wasn't the end of it, I'd rather die."

"I'm going to die." The echo came at that moment exactly from Paradis'
neighbor, who no doubt had examined the wound in his belly. "I'm sorry
on account of my children."

"It's on account of my children that I'm not sorry," came a murmur from
somewhere else. "I'm dying, so I know what I'm saying, and I say to
myself, 'They'll have peace.'"

"Perhaps I shan't die," said another, with a quiver of hope that he
could not restrain even in the presence of the doomed, "but I shall
suffer. Well, I say, 'more's the pity,' and I even say 'that's all
right'; and I shall know how to stick more suffering if I know it's for
something."

"Then we'll have to go on fighting after the war?"

"Yes, p'raps--"

"You want more of it, do you?"

"Yes, because I want no more of it," the voice grunted. "And p'raps
it'll not be foreigners that we've got to fight?"

"P'raps, yes--"

A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us. When it
had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain, seizing
and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the long
gaping trenches--long as the grave of an army--we began again.

"After all, what is it that makes the mass and the horror of war?"

"It's the mass of the people."

"But the people--that's us!"

He who had said it looked at me inquiringly.

"Yes," I said to him, "yes, old boy, that's true! It's with us only
that they make battles. It is we who are the material of war. War is
made up of the flesh and the souls of common soldiers only. It is we
who make the plains of dead and the rivers of blood, all of us, and
each of us is invisible and silent because of the immensity of our
numbers. The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a
wilderness of our making. Yes, war is al