[Sidenote: The soldier plays an impersonal part.] First, his impressions of the War are no longer fresh and now he would have some difficulty in analyzing them. It is as with ourselves in a new country: at first we have a thousand things to describe in our letters; after that nothing strikes us any longer. This passage to a sort of unconsciousness is the easier for the soldier as he plays a more impersonal part in the War; a simple cell in a great organism, a simple wheel in an enormous machine, quite beyond his comprehension in its learned complication. Catastrophes happen to him but no adventures: he may be wounded, he may be killed, nothing else. This is no material for fine stories. A deeper reason for the silence of the witness, or rather the actor, in the great drama of the War, is a very just realization of the impossibility of conveying any idea of it to those who have never been there. It is so very different from anything they know; so out of proportion to the normal life of human beings. [Sidenote: The wounded man does not like to think of war.] To these intellectual motives may be added one of feeling. The wounded soldier does not like to speak of the War because he does not like to think of it: there are too many horrors; he has had to bear too many privations, too much suffering. As soon as he finds himself out of it, he tries to turn his mind away from it as much as possible, and to shake off the impression of it, as the sick man in the morning shakes off his fevered nightmare. Later on, doubtless, when his memories have lost their keen edge, they may attract him again. All he asks for the moment is to forget. One thing especially afflicts his heart and tightens his lips: it is the thought of the comrades he has lost. Such are the reasons why the later wounded, differing from those at the beginning of the War, shut themselves up in a silence full of gravity. [Sidenote: The men in hospital are grateful.] [Sidenote: Infirmities are less felt.]