lets glide off him!" snarled Pilzer, who had set out to win
a bronze cross, only to see it won by a pygmy.

"Did you see many dead and wounded?" persisted the very tired voice of
the old reservist.

"Yes, yes--and every kind of destruction!" answered the judge's son.
"And--I kept thinking of Hugo Mallin."

"I'm glad they didn't shoot Hugo," said the very tired voice. "I'm sorry
for his old father and mother. I'm a father myself."

"I certainly had a good farewell kick at him!" declared Pilzer. "Lean on
yourself!" he added, giving a shove to the old reservist who was next
him.

"I saw men who had ceased to be human. That reminds me, Pilzer," the
judge's son went on, "I saw one wounded man, lying beside another, turn
and strike him, and he said: 'I had to hit somebody or something!' And I
heard a wounded man who was waiting in line before the surgeon's table
say: 'There's others hurt worse than me. I can wait.' I heard men
begging the doctors to put them out of their misery. I saw two dead men
with their hands clasped as they were when they died. Then there were
the men who went mad. One had to be held by force. He kept crying with
demoniacal laughs: 'I want to go back and kill--kill! Let's all kill,
kill, kill!' Another insisted on dancing, despite a bandaged leg. 'Look,
look at the little red spots!' he was saying. 'You must step on one
every time; if you don't, the automatic will get you!' Another declared
that he had been through hell and insisted that he would live forever
now. Another was an artist, a landscape-painter, who had lost his
eyesight. He was seeing beautiful landscapes, and the nurses had to
strap him to his cot to keep him from struggling to his feet and trying
to use an imaginary brush on imaginary canvases. He died seeing
beautiful landscapes.

"A pretty dreary sight, too, was the field of the dead, as I called it.
As the bodies were brought in they were laid in long rows, until there
was no more room without moving a supply depot. So there was nothing to
do but begin to pile them two deep. A service-corps man took off each
man's metal identification tag and tossed it into an ammunition box. One
box was already full and a second half full. Chink-chink-chink--tags of
the rich man's son and the poor man's son, the doctor of philosophy and
the illiterate; chink-chink-chink--a life each time. They'll take the
tags to the staff office and tired clerks will find the names that go
with the numbers."