"To live!"--"All of us!"--"You!"--"Me!" "No more war--ah, no!--it's too stupid--worse than that, it's too--" For a finishing echo to their half-formed thought a saying came to the mangled and miscarried murmur of the mob from a filth-crowned face that I saw arise from the level of the earth--"Two armies fighting each other--that's like one great army committing suicide!" * * * * * "And likewise, what have we been for two years now? Incredibly pitiful wretches, and savages as well, brutes, robbers, and dirty devils." "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." The roaring of the wind half smothered his words, so he lifted his head and repeated them. "Germany and militarism"--some one in his anger precipitately cut in--"they're the same thing. They wanted the war and they'd planned it beforehand. They are militarism." "Militarism--" a soldier began again. "What is it?" some one asked. "It's--it's brute force that's ready prepared, and that lets fly suddenly, any minute." "Yes. To-day militarism is called Germany." "Yes, but what will it be called to-morrow?" "I don't know," said a voice serious as a prophet's. "If the spirit of war isn't killed, you'll have struggle all through the ages." "We must--one's got to--"