We're too little to
hold it."
"You're right, we shall forget! Not only the length of the big
misery, which can't be calculated, as you say, ever since the
beginning, but the marches that turn up the ground and turn it
again, lacerating your feet and wearing out your bones under a load
that seems to grow bigger in the sky, the exhaustion until you don't
know your own name any more, the tramping and the inaction that
grind you, the digging jobs that exceed your strength, the endless
vigils when you fight against sleep and watch for an enemy who is
everywhere in the night, the pillows of dung and lice--we shall
forget not only those, but even the foul wounds of shells and
machine-guns, the mines, the gas, and the counter-attacks. At those
moments you're full of the excitement of reality, and you've some
satisfaction. But all that wears off and goes away, you don't know
how and you don't know where, and there's only the names left, only
the words of it, like in a dispatch."
"That's true what he says," remarks a man, without moving his head
in its pillory of mud. When I was on leave, I found I'd already
jolly well forgotten what had happened to me before. There were some
letters from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I
was opening. And yet in spite of that, I've forgotten also all the
pain I've had in the war. We're forgetting-machines. Men are things
that think a little but chiefly forget. That's what we are.
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