War now showed itself to Desnoyers with all its cruel hideousness.  He had been accustomed to speak of it heretofore as those in robust health speak of death, knowing that it exists and is horrible, but seeing it afar off . . . so far off that it arouses no real emotion.  The explosion of the shells were accompanying their destructive brutality with a ferocious mockery, grotesquely disfiguring the human body.  He saw wounded objects just beginning to recover their vital force who were but rough skeletons of men, frightful caricatures, human rags, saved from the tomb by the audacities of science—­trunks with heads which were dragged along on wheeled platforms; fragments of skulls whose brains were throbbing under an artificial cap; beings without arms and without legs, resting in the bottom of little wagons, like bits of plaster models or scraps from the dissecting room; faces without noses that looked like skulls with great, black nasal openings.  And these half-men were talking, smoking, laughing, satisfied to see the sky, to feel the caress of the sun, to have come back to life, dominated by that sovereign desire to live which trustingly forgets present misery in the confident hope of something better.

So strongly was Julio impressed that for a little while he forgot the purpose which had brought him thither. . . .  If those who provoke war from diplomatic chambers or from the tables of the Military Staff could but see it—­not in the field of battle fired with the enthusiasm which prejudices judgments—­but in cold blood, as it is seen in the hospitals and cemeteries, in the wrecks left in its trail! . . .

To Julio’s imagination this terrestrial globe appeared like an enormous ship sailing through infinity.  Its crews—­poor humanity—­had spent century after century in exterminating each other on the deck.  They did not even know what existed under their feet, in the hold of the vessel.  To occupy the same portion of the surface in the sunlight seemed to be the ruling desire of each group.  Men, considered superior human beings, were pushing these masses to extermination in order to scale the last bridge and hold the helm, controlling the course of the boat.  And all those who felt the overmastering ambition for absolute command knew the same thing . . . nothing.  Not one of them could say with certainty what lay beyond the visible horizon, nor whither the ship was drifting.  The sullen hostility of mystery surrounded them all; their life was precarious, necessitating incessant care in order to maintain it, yet in spite of that, the crew for ages and ages, had never known an instant of agreement, of team work, of clear reason.  Periodically half of them would clash with the other half.  They killed each other that they might enslave the vanquished on the rolling deck floating over the abyss; they fought that they might cast their victims from the vessel, filling its wake with cadavers.  And from the demented throng there were still springing up gloomy sophistries to prove that a state of war was the perfect state, that it ought to go on forever, that it was a bad dream on the part of the crew to wish to regard each other as brothers with a common destiny, enveloped in the same unsteady environment of mystery. . . .  Ah, human misery!