somehow had strange power to
liberate his emotion.

The officer Huon spoke English, and upon his words Dorn hung spellbound.

"You Americans have the fine dash, the nerve. You will perform wonders.
But you don't realize what this war is. You will perish of sheer
curiosity to see or eagerness to fight. But these are the least of the
horrors of this war.

"Actual fighting is to me a relief, a forgetfulness, an excitement, and
is so with many of my comrades. We have survived wounds, starvation,
shell-shock, poison gas and fire, the diseases of war, the awful toil of
the trenches. And each and every one of us who has served long bears in
his mind the particular horror that haunts him. I have known veterans to
go mad at the screaming of shells. I have seen good soldiers stand upon
a trench, inviting the fire that would end suspense. For a man who hopes
to escape alive this war is indeed the ninth circle of hell.

"My own particular horrors are mud, water, and cold. I have lived in
dark, cold mud-holes so long that my mind concerning them is not right.
I know it the moment I come out to rest. Rest! Do you know that we
cannot rest? The comfort of this dirty old barn, of these fires, of this
bare ground is so great that we cannot rest, we cannot sleep, we cannot
do anything. When I think of the past winter I do not remember injury
and agony for myself, or the maimed and mangled bodies of my comrades. I
remember only the horrible cold, the endless ages of waiting, the
hopeless misery of the dugouts, foul, black rat-holes that we had to
crawl into through sticky mud and filthy water. Mud, water, and cold,
with the stench of the dead clogging your nostrils! That to me is
war!... _Les Miserables!_ You Americans will never know that, thank God.
For it could not be endured by men who did not belong to this soil.
After all, the filthy water is half blood and the mud is part of the
dead of our people."

Huon talked on and on, with the eloquence of a Frenchman who relieves
himself of a burden. He told of trenches dug in a swamp, lived in and
fought in, and then used for the graves of the dead, trenches that had
to be lived in again months afterward. The rotting dead were everywhere.
When they were covered the rain would come to wash away the earth,
exposing them again. That was the strange refrain of this soldier's
moody lament--the rain that fell, the mud that forever held him rooted
fast in the tracks of his despair. He told of n