And misery is endlessly begotten of the miserable.

There is no real reason for it all; there is no reason.  I do not wish it.  I groan, I fall back.

Then the question, worn, but stubborn and violent as a solid thing, seizes upon me again.  Why?  Why?  I am like the weeping wind.  I seek, I defend myself, amid the infinite despair of my mind and heart.  I listen.  I remember all.

* * * * * *

A booming sound vibrates and increases, like the fitful wing-beats of some dim, tumultuous archangel, above the heads of the masses that move in countless dungeons, or wheel round to furnish the front of the lines with new flesh:—­

“Forward!  It has to be!  You shall not know!”

I remember.  I have seen much of it, and I see it clearly.  These multitudes who are set in motion and let loose,—­their brains and their souls and their wills are not in them, but outside them!

* * * * * *

Other people, far away, think and wish for them.  Other people wield their hands and push them and pull them, others, who hold all their controlling threads; in the distance, the people in the center of the infernal orbits, in the capital cities, in the palaces.  There is a higher law; up above men there is a machine which is stronger than men.  The multitude is at the same time power and impotence—­and I remember, and I know well that I have seen it with my own eyes.  War is the multitude—­and it is not!  Why did I not know it since I have seen it?

Soldier of the wide world, you, the man taken haphazard from among men, remember—­there was not a moment when you were yourself.  Never did you cease to be bowed under the harsh and answerless command, “It has to be, it has to be.”  In times of peace encircled in the law of incessant labor, in the mechanical mill or the commercial mill, slave of the tool, of the pen, of your talent, or of some other thing, you were tracked without respite from morning to evening by the daily task which allowed you only just to overcome life, and to rest only in dreams.

When the war comes that you never wanted—­whatever your country and your name—­the terrible fate which grips you is sharply unmasked, offensive and complicated.  The wind of condemnation has arisen.

They requisition your body.  They lay hold on you with measures of menace which are like legal arrest, from which nothing that is poor and needy can escape.  They imprison you in barracks.  They strip you naked as a worm, and dress you again in a uniform which obliterates you; they mark your neck with a number.  The uniform even enters into your flesh, for you are shaped and cut out by the stamping-machine of exercises.  Brightly clad strangers spring up about you, and encircle you.  You recognize them—­they are not strangers.  It is a carnival, then,—­but a fierce and final