Nearer, one makes out the human shape of great drifts and hilly fields, many-colored and vaguely floral—­the corpse of a section or of a company.  Nearer still, I perceive at my feet the ugliness of skulls.  Yes, I have seen them—­wounds as big as men!  In this new cess-pool, which fire dyes red by night and the multitude dyes red by day, crows are staggering, drunk.

Yonder, that is the listening-post, keeping watch over the cycles of time.  Five or six captive sentinels are buried there in that cistern’s dark, their faces grimacing through the vent-hole, their skull-caps barred with red as with gleams from hell, their mien desperate and ravenous.

When I ask them why they are fighting, they say:—­

“To save my country.”

I am wandering on the other side of the immense fields where the yellow puddles are strewn with black ones (for blood soils even mud), and with thickets of steel, and with trees which are no more than the shadows of themselves; I hear the skeleton of my jaws shiver and chatter.  In the middle of the flayed and yawning cemetery of living and dead, moonlike in the night, there is a wide extent of leveled ruins.  It was not a village that once was there, it was a hillside whose pale bones are like those of a village.  The other people—­mine—­have scooped fragile holes, and traced disastrous paths with their hands and with their feet.  Their faces are strained forward, their eyes search, they sniff the wind.

“Why are you fighting?”

“To save my country.”

The two answers fall as alike in the distance as two notes of a passing-bell, as alike as the voice of the guns.

* * * * * *

And I—­I am seeking; it is a fever, a longing, a madness.  I struggle, I would fain tear myself from the soil and take wing to the truth.  I am seeking the difference between those people who are killing themselves, and I can only find their resemblance.  I cannot escape from this resemblance of men.  It terrifies me, and I try to cry out, and there come from me strange and chaotic sounds which echo into the unknown, which I almost hear!

They do not wear similar clothes on the targets of their bodies, and they speak different tongues; but from the bottom of that which is human within them, identically the same simplicities come forth.  They have the same sorrows and the same angers, around the same causes.  They are alike as their wounds are alike and will be alike.  Their sayings are as similar as the cries that pain wrings from them, as alike as the awful silence that soon will breathe from their murdered lips.  They only fight because they are face to face.  Against each other, they are pursuing a common end.  Dimly, they kill themselves because they are alike.

And by day and by night, these two halves of war continue to lie in wait for each other afar, to dig their graves at their feet, and I am helpless.  They are separated by frontiers of gulfs, which bristle with weapons and explosive snares, impassable to life.  They are separated by all that can separate, by dead men and still by dead men, and ever thrown back, each into its gasping islands, by black rivers and consecrated fires, by heroism and hatred.