It is befouled faces and
tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses
even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that, that endless
monotony of misery, broken, by poignant tragedies; it is that, and
not the bayonet glittering like silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer
call to the sun!"
Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and
growled, "D'you remember the woman in the town where we went about a
bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and
said, 'How beautiful they must be to see!'"
A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a
cloak, raised his bead out of the filthy background in which it was
sunk, and cried, 'Beautiful? Oh, hell! It's just as if an ox were to
say, 'What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle
driven forward to the slaughter-house!'" He spat out mud from his
besmeared mouth, and his unburied face was like a beast's.
"Let them say, 'It must be,'" he sputtered in a strange jerky voice,
grating and ragged; "that's all right. But beautiful! Oh, hell!"
Writhing under the idea, he added passionately, "It's when they say
things like that that they hit us hardest of all!" He spat again,
hut exhausted by his effort he fell back in his bath of mud, and
laid his head in his spittle.
* * * * * *
Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide
unspeakable landscape. and looking steadily on it repeated his
sentence, 'War is that.
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