to Lagneau, his arguments were exactly contrary to those he had advanced on the previous day to Clerambault.  It was not only that his ideas had changed, but apparently his whole disposition.  One morning there would be nothing violent enough for his thirst for action and destruction, and the next he would talk about going into a little business with lots of money, the best of food, a tribe of children to bring up, and to hell with the rest!  Though they all called themselves sincere internationalists, there were few among these poilus who had not preserved the old French prejudice of superiority of race over the rest of the world, enemies or friends; and even in their own country over the other provinces, or if they were Parisians, over the rest of France.  This idea was firmly embedded in their minds, and they boasted of it, not maliciously but by way of a joke.  Uncomplaining, willing, always ready to go, like Gillot, they were certainly capable of making a revolution and then un-making it, starting another, and so on—­tra-la-la—­till all was upset and they were ready to be the prey of the first adventurer who happened along.  Our political foxes know well enough that the best way to check a revolution is, at the right moment, to let it blow over while the people are amused.

It looked then as if the hour was at hand.  A year before the end of the war in both camps there were months and weeks when the infinite patience of the martyrised people seemed on the point of giving way; when a great cry was ready to go up, “Enough.”  For the first time there was the universal impression of a bloody deception.  It is easy to understand the indignation of the people seeing billions thrown away on the war when before it their leaders had haggled over a few hundred thousand for social betterments.  There were figures that exasperated them more than any speeches on the subject.  Someone had calculated that it cost 75,000 francs to kill a man; that made ten millions of corpses, and for the same sum we could have had ten millions of stockholders.  The stupidest could see the immense value of the treasure, and the horrible, the shameful, waste for an illusion.  There were things more abject still; from one end of Europe to the other, there were vermin fattening on death, war-profiteers, robbers of corpses.

“Do not talk to us any more,” said these young men to themselves, “of the struggle of democracies against autocracies;—­they are all tarred with the same brush.  In all countries the war has pointed out the leaders to the vengeance of the people; that unworthy middle class, political, financial, intellectual, that in a single century of power has heaped on the world more exactions, crimes, ruins and follies, than kings and churches had inflicted in ten centuries.”