me, one must tell things as they are!...  Do you want to know what is at the bottom of it all, Sir?  The real truth is that we do not care for life, or not enough.  In one of your articles you say very truly that life is the great thing;—­only you wouldn’t think so to see most people at this minute!  Not much life about them; they all seem drowsy, waiting for the last sleep; it looks as if they said to themselves:  ’We are flat on our backs now, no need to stir an inch.’  No, we don’t make enough out of life.  And then people are always trying to spoil it for you.  From the time you are a child they keep on telling you about the beauty of death, or about dead folks.  In the catechism, in the history books, they are always shouting:  ‘Mourir pour la Patrie!’ It is either popery or patriotism, whichever you please; and then this life of the present day is a perfect nuisance; it looks as if it was made expressly to take the backbone out of a man.  There is no more initiative.  We are all nothing but machines, but with no real system; we only do pieces of work, never knowing where our work will fit in; most often it doesn’t fit at all.  It is all a mess, with no good in it for anyone; we are thrown in on top of one another like herrings in a barrel, no one knows why;—­but then we don’t know either why we live at all; it is not life, we are just there.

“They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers took the Bastille.  Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments.  We know that it is not so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but the old one did not do such great things for us after all!  It’s hard to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full of toads....  People are always doing something to confuse the issue, nowadays; talking about Right, Justice, Liberty.  But that trick is played out.  Good enough to die for, but you can’t live for things like that.”

“How about the present?” asked Clerambault.

“Now?  There is no going, back, but I often think that if I had to begin over again—­”

“When did you change your mind about all these things?”

“That was the funniest thing of all.  It was as soon as I was wounded.  It was like getting out of bed in the morning.  I had hardly slipped a leg out of life than I wanted to draw it in again.  I had been so well off, and never thought of it, ass that I was!  I can still see myself, as I came to.  The ground was all torn up around me, worse even than the bodies themselves lying in heaps, mixed pell-mell like a lot of jack-straws; the ground simply reeked, as if it was itself bleeding.  It was pitch dark, and at first I did not feel anything but the cold, except that I knew I was hit, all right....