illustrations, a few rays of light, such as one still
gets sometimes. I do not know if they will become more frequent with the
new evolution of the War. They have been rare, and never followed by
long expansiveness. Our wounded soldier of the fourth year of the War
did not like to speak of what he had done nor of what he had seen. What
may be the reasons for his silence? In seeking to interpret them we
penetrate a little into the psychology of this taciturn man.

[Sidenote: The soldier plays an impersonal part.]

First, his impressions of the War are no longer fresh and now he would
have some difficulty in analyzing them. It is as with ourselves in a new
country: at first we have a thousand things to describe in our letters;
after that nothing strikes us any longer. This passage to a sort of
unconsciousness is the easier for the soldier as he plays a more
impersonal part in the War; a simple cell in a great organism, a simple
wheel in an enormous machine, quite beyond his comprehension in its
learned complication. Catastrophes happen to him but no adventures: he
may be wounded, he may be killed, nothing else. This is no material for
fine stories.

A deeper reason for the silence of the witness, or rather the actor, in
the great drama of the War, is a very just realization of the
impossibility of conveying any idea of it to those who have never been
there. It is so very different from anything they know; so out of
proportion to the normal life of human beings.

[Sidenote: The wounded man does not like to think of war.]

To these intellectual motives may be added one of feeling. The wounded
soldier does not like to speak of the War because he does not like to
think of it: there are too many horrors; he has had to bear too many
privations, too much suffering. As soon as he finds himself out of it,
he tries to turn his mind away from it as much as possible, and to shake
off the impression of it, as the sick man in the morning shakes off his
fevered nightmare. Later on, doubtless, when his memories have lost
their keen edge, they may attract him again. All he asks for the moment
is to forget. One thing especially afflicts his heart and tightens his
lips: it is the thought of the comrades he has lost.

Such are the reasons why the later wounded, differing from those at the
beginning of the War, shut themselves up in a silence full of gravity.

[Sidenote: The men in hospital are grateful.]

[Sidenote: Infirmities are l