"
"Worse than that!" mutters he whose only phrase it is.
"Yes, I admit it!"
In their troubled truce of the morning, these men whom fatigue had
tormented, whom rain had scourged, whom night-long lightning had
convulsed, these survivors of volcanoes and flood began not only to
see dimly how war, as hideous morally as physically, outrages common
sense, debases noble ideas and dictates all kind of crime, but they
remembered how it had enlarged in them and about them every evil
instinct save none, mischief developed into lustful cruelty,
selfishness into ferocity, the hunger for enjoyment into a mania.
They are picturing all this before their eyes as just now they
confusedly pictured their misery. They are crammed with a curse
which strives to find a way out and to come to light in words, a
curse which makes them to groan and wail. It is as if they toiled to
emerge from the delusion and ignorance which soil them as the mud
soils them; as if they will at last know why they are scourged.
"Well then?" clamors one.
"Ay, what then?" the other repeats, still more grandly. The wind
sets the flooded flats a-tremble to our eyes, and falling furiously
on the human masses lying or kneeling and fixed like flagstones and
grave-slabs, it wrings new shivering from them.
"There will be no more war," growls a soldier, "when there is no
more Germany."
"That's not the right thing to say!" cries another. "It isn't
enough. There'll be no more war when the spirit of war is defeated.
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