And I--I am seeking; it is a fever, a longing, a madness. I struggle, I would fain tear myself from the soil and take wing to the truth. I am seeking the difference between those people who are killing themselves, and I can only find their resemblance. I cannot escape from this resemblance of men. It terrifies me, and I try to cry out, and there come from me strange and chaotic sounds which echo into the unknown, which I almost hear! They do not wear similar clothes on the targets of their bodies, and they speak different tongues; but from the bottom of that which is human within them, identically the same simplicities come forth. They have the same sorrows and the same angers, around the same causes. They are alike as their wounds are alike and will be alike. Their sayings are as similar as the cries that pain wrings from them, as alike as the awful silence that soon will breathe from their murdered lips. They only fight because they are face to face. Against each other, they are pursuing a common end. Dimly, they kill themselves because they are alike. And by day and by night, these two halves of war continue to lie in wait for each other afar, to dig their graves at their feet, and I am helpless. They are separated by frontiers of gulfs, which bristle with weapons and explosive snares, impassable to life. They are separated by all that can separate, by dead men and still by dead men, and ever thrown back, each into its gasping islands, by black rivers and consecrated fires, by heroism and hatred. And misery is endlessly begotten of the miserable. There is no real reason for it all; there is no reason. I do not wish it. I groan, I fall back. Then the question, worn, but stubborn and violent as a solid thing, seizes upon me again. Why? Why? I am like the weeping wind. I seek, I defend myself, amid the infinite despair of my mind and heart. I listen. I remember all. * * * * * * A booming sound vibrates and increases, like the fitful wing-beats of some dim, tumultuous archangel, above the heads of the masses that move in countless dungeons, or wheel round to furnish the front of the lines with new flesh:-- "Forward! It has to be! You shall _not_ know!" I remember. I have seen much of it, and I see it clearly. These multitudes who are set in motion and let loose,--their brains and their souls and their wills are not in them, but outside them! * * * * * *