Well, all the same, if this wasn't the end of it, I'd rather die."
"I'm going to die." The echo came at that moment exactly from
Paradis' neighbor, who no doubt had examined the wound in his belly.
"I'm sorry on account of my children."
"It's on account of my children that I'm not sorry," came a murmur
from somewhere else. "I'm dying, so I know what I'm saying, and I
say to myself, 'They'll have peace.'"
"Perhaps I shan't die," said another, with a quiver of hope that he
could not restrain even in the presence of the doomed, "but I shall
suffer. Well, I say, 'more's the pity,' and I even say 'that's all
right'; and I shall know how to stick more suffering if I know it's
for something."
"Then we'll have to go on fighting after the war?"
"Yes, p'raps--"
"You want more of it, do you?"
"Yes, because I want no more of it," the voice grunted. "And p'raps
it'll not be foreigners that we've got to fight?"
"P'raps, yes--"
A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us. When
it had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain,
seizing and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the
long gaping trenches--long as the grave of an army--we began again.
"After all, what is it that makes the mass and the horror of war?"
"It's the mass of the people."
"But the people--that's us!"
He who had said it looked at me inquiringly.
"Yes," I said to him, "yes, old boy, that's true! It's with us only
that they make battles.
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