disease, and
madness. We had been hurled up and down an invisible line of death,
bending and pressing it back and forth like a horde of ants at a thread.

Every human thought and fact had by now changed in us. As we formerly
recognized our friends, we seemed to know each other now as the citizens
of a new state on earth, in which the people did not live by productive
labor, nor in houses, nor in families, but like strange bees in an
unknown place, sexless, unconscious of our activity, destroying instead
of building. It was as if we had been born that way. All memory of
another life was sunk deep into the subconscious. We had become highly
specialized things, yet knew not in what or for what. Birth and death
had lost their meaning.

Tens of thousands of us had disappeared. Thousands took their places
nonchalantly. As the opening of the third year approached, there was
in the air the wild and brooding sense of the millions of German and
Austrian lives and as many of the Allies that had gone out before their
time.

Earth seemed to stir into consciousness of it.

The carnival of Chaos had spread like a wanton dementia. Italy had
long since flung aside her sane reserve and plunged into the carnage
for the shreds of Austria she desired--Tyrol, Dalmatia, Istria, and
Albania. Rumania and Greece had joined with Servia and bound the Balkans
into a temporary brotherhood. Together with Russia and Italy at Haskoi
they had scattered the crazy Turkish army like chaff and swarmed on to
the Bosphorus. The allied fleet drove a withering wedge of steel and
fire through the Dardanelles. Constantinople fell.

As to a Bacchanal of Blood, the colonies tore out of the map every
shred of German colonial territory there was, and poured into Europe
their flood of black, white, and yellow men. Little Denmark, catching
the festive spirit, reached out for Schleswig-Holstein; and the rest,
coveting the Kiel Canal, lent a willing hand to the useful tool.
Holland, sore from being the frail buffer between the struggling
combatants, placed her interests in the British hands, and opened
another gate to the heart of Germany.

Russia debouched her million after million upon the East, and though
they died dumbly like flies before the German walls of steel at Thorn
and Bromberg, they swept the Germans back over the Vistula and out of
East Prussia down to the line of the Warthe and Oder. Austria, torn by
internal dissension, was ringed in the upper basi