"
"Then neither the other side nor us'll remember! So much misery all
wasted!"
This point of view added to the abasement of these beings on the
shore of the flood, like news of a greater disaster, and humiliated
them still more.
"Ah, if one did remember!" cried some one.
"If we remembered," said another, "there wouldn't be any more war."
A third added grandly, "Yes, if we remembered, war would be less
useless than it is."
But suddenly one of the prone survivors rose to his knees, dark as a
great bat ensnared, and as the mud dripped from his waving arms he
cried in a hollow voice, "There must be no more war after this!"
In that miry corner where, still feeble unto impotence, we were
beset by blasts of wind which laid hold on us with such rude
strength that the very ground seemed to sway like sea-drift, the cry
of the man who looked as if he were trying to fly away evoked other
like cries: "There must be no more war after this!"
The sullen or furious exclamations of these men fettered to the
earth, incarnate of earth, arose and slid away on the wind like
beating wings--
"No more war! No more war! Enough of it!"
"It's too stupid--it's too stupid," they mumbled.
"What does it mean, at the bottom of it, all this?--all this that
you can't even give a name to?"
They snarled and growled like wild beasts on that sort of ice-floe
contended for by the elements, in their dismal disguise of ragged
mud.
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