ey'll say those things to us by way of
paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't
done. But military glory--it isn't even true for us common soldiers.
It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie,
like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's
sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves
of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful
inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor
little names of nobodies."

"To hell with it all," replies a man, "we've got other things to think
about."

"But all that," hiccupped a face which the mud concealed like a hideous
hand, "may you even say it? You'd be cursed, and 'shot at dawn'!
They've made around a Marshal's plumes a religion as bad and stupid and
malignant as the other!"

The man raised himself, fell down, and rose again. The wound that he
had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he had
spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had given
for the healing of the world.

* * * * *

The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling
more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day is
full of night. It is as if new enemy shapes of men and groups of men
are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of clouds,
round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles, churches, royal
and military palaces and temples. They seem to multiply there, shutting
out the stars that are fewer than mankind; it seems even as if these
apparitions are moving in all directions in the excavated ground, here,
there, among the real beings who are thrown there at random, half
buried in the earth like grains of corn.

My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with
difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb, laid
out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge simplicity
out of the earth's depths--a profoundity like that of ignorance--they
move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and their fists extended
towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm. They are struggling
against victorious specters, like the Cyranos and Don Quixotes that
they still are.

One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the
plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old
trenches, wh