I had none to give.  My little girl will never see me again, and I shall never see her grow into a woman.  Because I am going to be killed.  Perhaps in a day or two there will be no more life for me.  This hand of mine—­you see I can grasp things with it, move it this way and that, shake hands with you—­camarade!—­salute the spirit of France with it—­comme ca!  But tomorrow or the next day it will be quite still.  A dead thing—­like my dead body.  It is queer.  Here I sit talking to you alive.  But to-morrow or the next day my corpse will lie out on the battlefield, like a bit of earth.  I can see that corpse of mine, with its white face and staring eyes.  Ugh! it is a dirty sight—­a man’s corpse.  Here in my heart something tells me that I shall be killed quite soon, perhaps at the first shot.  But do you know I shall not be sorry to die.  I shall be glad, Monsieur!  And why glad, you ask?  Because I love France and hate the Germans who have put this war on to us.  I am going to fight—­I, a Socialist and a syndicalist—­so that we shall make an end of war, so that the little ones of France shall sleep in peace, and the women go without fear.  This war will have to be the last war.  It is a war of Justice against Injustice.  When they have finished this time the people will have no more of it.  We who go out to die shall be remembered because we gave the world peace.  That will be our reward, though we shall know nothing of it but lie rotting in the earth—­dead!  It is sad that to-morrow, or the next day, I shall be dead.  I see my corpse there-----”

He saw his corpse again, and wept a little at the sight of it.

A neurotic type—­a poor weed of life who had been reared in the dark lairs of civilization.  Yet I had no contempt for him as he gibbered with self-pity.  The tragedy of the future of civilization was in the soul of that pallid, sharp-featured, ill-nourished man who had lived in misery within the glitter of a rich city and who was now being taken to his death—­I feel sure he died in the trenches even though no bullet may have reached him—­at the command of great powers who knew nothing of this poor ant.  What did his individual life matter? ...  I stared into the soul of a soldier of France and wondered at the things I saw in it—­at the spiritual faith which made a patriot of that apache.

19

There was a change of company in the carriage, the democrats being turned into a third-class carriage to make way for half a dozen officers of various grades and branches.  I had new types to study and was surprised by the calmness and quietude of these men—­mostly of middle age—­who had just left their homes for active service.  They showed no signs of excitement but chatted about the prospects of the war as though it were an abstract problem.  The attitude of England was questioned and again I was called upon to speak as the representative of my country and to assure Frenchmen of our friendship and co-operation.  They seemed satisfied with my statements and expressed their belief that the British Fleet would make short work of the enemy at sea.