He means--and I am with him in his meaning--"More than attacks that are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife, War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken, by poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet glittering like silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer call to the sun!" Paradis was so full of this thought that he ruminated a memory, and growled, "D'you remember the woman in the town where we went about a bit not so very long ago? She talked some drivel about attacks, and said, 'How beautiful they must be to see!'" A chasseur who was full length on his belly, flattened out like a cloak, raised his head out of the filthy background in which it was sunk, and cried, "Beautiful? Oh, hell! It's just as if an ox were to say, 'What a fine sight it must be, all those droves of cattle driven forward to the slaughter-house!'" He spat out mud from his besmeared mouth, and his unburied face was like a beast's. "Let them say, 'It must be,'" he sputtered in a strange jerky voice, grating and ragged; "that's all right. But beautiful! Oh, hell!" Writhing under the idea, he added passionately, "It's when they say things like that that they hit us hardest of all!" He spat again, but exhausted by his effort he fell back in his bath of mud, and laid his head in his spittle. * * * * * Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide unspeakable landscape, and looking steadily on it repeated his sentence, "War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we chaps, and what's all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is only a speck. You've got to remember that this morning there's three thousand kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse." "And then," said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognize even by his voice, "to-morrow it begins again. It began again the day before yesterday, and all the days before that!" With an effort as if he was tearing the ground, the chasseur dragged his body out of the earth where he had molded a depression like an oozing coffin, and sat in the hole. He blinked his eyes and tried to shake the balance of mud from his face, and said, "We shall come out of it again this time. And who knows, p'raps we shall come out of it again to-morrow! Who knows?" Paradis, with his back bent under mats of earth and clay, was trying to convey his idea that the war cannot be imagined or measured in terms of time and space. "When one speaks of the whole war," he said, thinking aloud, "it's as if you said nothing at all--the words are strangled. We're here, and we look at it all like blind men."