abyss was the distance from star to star!  Suppose that they fell at the same rate of speed!  The first to be dashed against a shelf of rock would be a ghastly reminder to each man of his own approaching end.  But, proceeding on horror’s journey, he would become accustomed to such pictures.  He would feel hunger and cold.  Physical discomfort would overwhelm mental agony.  If a biscuit shot out from the pocket of a corpse, wouldn’t the living hand grab for it in brute greediness?

The thinner the veneer of civilized habit, the more easily the animal, always waiting and craving war, breaks through.  And the animal was strong in Jacob Pilzer, the butcher’s son.  He had a bull’s heart and lacked the little tendrils of sensibility whose writhing would tire him.  Hugo Mallin had these tendrils by the thousand.  He had so many that they gave him a reserve physical endurance like a kind of intoxication.  He felt as if he had been drinking some noxious, foamy wine which made his mind singularly keen to every impression.  Therefore he and Pilzer alone of Fracasse’s company were not utterly fatigued.

The savagery of Pilzer’s bitterness at seeing another get the bronze cross before he received one turned not on little Peterkin, the valet’s son, but on Hugo.  As he and Hugo moved, elbow to elbow, picking their way forward from the knoll, he eased his mind with rough sarcasm at Hugo’s expense.  He christened Hugo “White Liver.”  When Hugo stumbled over a stone he whispered: 

“White Liver, that comes from the shaking knees of a coward!”

Hugo did not answer, nor did he after they had crossed the road and were under the cover of the fourth terrace wall, and Pilzer whispered: 

“Still with us, little White Liver?  Cowards are lucky.  But your time will come.  You will die of fright.”

They worked their way ahead in the darkness to the third terrace and then to the second, without drawing fire.  There they were told to unslip their packs “and sleep—­sleep!”

Fracasse passed the word, as if this were also an order which perforce must be obeyed.  They dropped down in a row, their heads against the cold stone wall.  So closely packed were their bodies that they could feel one another’s breaths and heart-beats.  Where last night they had thought of a multitude of things in vivid flashes, to-night nothing was vivid after the last explosion in the town and there was an end of firing.  Spaces of consciousness and unconsciousness were woven together in a kind of patchwork chaos of mind.  For the raw brains were not yet quite calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the day.

Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes.  He lay quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars.  Unlike his comrades, he had not to go to hell in order to know what hell was like.  He had foreseen the nature of war’s reality, so it had not come as a surprise.  Sufficient universal projection of this kind of imagination might afford sufficient martial excitement without war.