dyes red by day, crows
are staggering, drunk.

Yonder, that is the listening-post, keeping watch over the cycles of
time. Five or six captive sentinels are buried there in that cistern's
dark, their faces grimacing through the vent-hole, their skull-caps
barred with red as with gleams from hell, their mien desperate and
ravenous.

When I ask them why they are fighting, they say:--

"To save my country."

I am wandering on the other side of the immense fields where the yellow
puddles are strewn with black ones (for blood soils even mud), and with
thickets of steel, and with trees which are no more than the shadows of
themselves; I hear the skeleton of my jaws shiver and chatter. In the
middle of the flayed and yawning cemetery of living and dead, moonlike
in the night, there is a wide extent of leveled ruins. It was not a
village that once was there, it was a hillside whose pale bones are
like those of a village. The other people--mine--have scooped fragile
holes, and traced disastrous paths with their hands and with their
feet. Their faces are strained forward, their eyes search, they sniff
the wind.

"Why are you fighting?"

"To save my country."

The two answers fall as alike in the distance as two notes of a
passing-bell, as alike as the voice of the guns.

* * * * * *

And I--I am seeking; it is a fever, a longing, a madness. I struggle,
I would fain tear myself from the soil and take wing to the truth. I
am seeking the difference between those people who are killing
themselves, and I can only find their resemblance. I cannot escape
from this resemblance of men. It terrifies me, and I try to cry out,
and there come from me strange and chaotic sounds which echo into the
unknown, which I almost hear!

They do not wear similar clothes on the targets of their bodies, and
they speak different tongues; but from the bottom of that which is
human within them, identically the same simplicities come forth. They
have the same sorrows and the same angers, around the same causes.
They are alike as their wounds are alike and will be alike. Their
sayings are as similar as the cries that pain wrings from them, as
alike as the awful silence that soon will breathe from their murdered
lips. They only fight because they are face to face. Against each
other, they are pursuing a common end. Dimly, they kill themselves
because they are alike.

And by day and by night, these