ust to overcome life, and to rest only in dreams.

When the war comes that you never wanted--whatever your country and
your name--the terrible fate which grips you is sharply unmasked,
offensive and complicated. The wind of condemnation has arisen.

They requisition your body. They lay hold on you with measures of
menace which are like legal arrest, from which nothing that is poor and
needy can escape. They imprison you in barracks. They strip you naked
as a worm, and dress you again in a uniform which obliterates you; they
mark your neck with a number. The uniform even enters into your flesh,
for you are shaped and cut out by the stamping-machine of exercises.
Brightly clad strangers spring up about you, and encircle you. You
recognize them--they are not strangers. It is a carnival, then,--but a
fierce and final carnival, for these are your new masters, they the
absolute, proclaiming on their fists and heads their gilded authority.
Such of them as are near to you are themselves only the servants of
others, who wear a greater power painted on their clothes. It is a
life of misery, humiliation and diminution into which you fall from day
to day, badly fed and badly treated, assailed throughout your body,
spurred on by your warders' orders. At every moment you are thrown
violently back into your littleness, you are punished for the least
action which comes out of it, or slain by the order of your masters.
It is forbidden you to speak when you would unite yourself with the
brother who is touching you. The silence of steel reigns around you.
Your thoughts must be only profound endurance. Discipline is
indispensable for the multitude to be melted into a single army; and in
spite of the vague kinship which is sometimes set up between you and
your nearest chief, the machine-like order paralyzes you first, so that
your body may be the better made to move in accordance with the rhythm
of the rank and the regiment--into which, nullifying all that is
yourself, you pass already as a sort of dead man.

"They gather us together but they separate us!" cries a voice from the
past.

If there are some who escape through the meshes, it means that such
"slackers" are also influential. They are uncommon, in spite of
appearances, as the influential are. You, the isolated man, the
ordinary man, the lowly thousand-millionth of humanity, you evade
nothing, and you march right to the end of all that happens, or to the
end of your