l of us, and all of us
together."

"Yes, that's true. It's the people who are war; without them, there
would be nothing, nothing but some wrangling, a long way off. But it
isn't they who decide on it; it's the masters who steer them."

"The people are struggling to-day to have no more masters that steer
them. This war, it's like the French Revolution continuing."

"Well then, if that's so, we're working for the Prussians too?"

"It's to be hoped so," said one of the wretches of the plain.

"Oh, hell!" said the chasseur, grinding his teeth. But he shook his
head and added no more.

"We want to look after ourselves! You shouldn't meddle in other
people's business," mumbled the obstinate snarler.

"Yes, you should! Because what you call 'other people,' that's just
what they're not--they're the same!"

"Why is it always us that has to march away for everybody?"

"That's it!" said a man, and he repeated the words he had used a moment
before. "More's the pity, or so much the better."

"The people--they're nothing, though they ought to be everything," then
said the man who had questioned me, recalling, though he did not know
it, an historic sentence of more than a century ago, but investing it
at last with its great universal significance. Escaped from torment, on
all fours in the deep grease of the ground, he lifted his leper-like
face and looked hungrily before him into infinity.

He looked and looked. He was trying to open the gates of heaven.

* * * * *

"The peoples of the world ought to come to an understanding, through
the hides and on the bodies of those who exploit them one way or
another. All the masses ought to agree together."

"All men ought to be equal."

The word seems to come to us like a rescue.

"Equal--yes--yes--there are some great meanings for justice and truth.
There are some things one believes in, that one turns to and clings to
as if they were a sort of light. There's equality, above all."

"There's liberty and fraternity, too."

"But principally equality!"

I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain
sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he
does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him. You can build
nothing on fraternity. Nor on liberty, either; it is too relative a
thing in a society where all the elements subdivide each other by force.

But equality is always the same. Liberty and fraternity are w