"That's true what he says," remarks a man, without moving his head in its pillory of mud. "When I was on leave, I found I'd already jolly well forgotten what had happened to me before. There were some letters from me that I read over again just as if they were a book I was opening. And yet in spite of that, I've forgotten also all the pain I've had in the war. We're forgetting-machines. Men are things that think a little but chiefly forget. That's what we are." "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. So huge was the protest thus rousing them in revolt that it choked them. "We're made to live, not to be done in like this!" "Men are made to be husbands, fathers--men, what the devil!--not beasts that hunt each other and cut each other's throats and make themselves stink like all that." "And yet, everywhere--everywhere--there are beasts, savage beasts or smashed beasts. Look, look!" I shall never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men like a fit of madness. I could see them agitated by this idea--that to try to live one's life on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and even an ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to make easy the inner life of every one.