“Yes, Father.”

“Not too tired by the journey?”

“No, not too much.”

“What wound?”

“Jaw pierced by a bullet, arm broken, wound in the thigh.”

“How goes it?”

[Sidenote:  The wounded are delighted with the success of the attack.]

“Very well!  The wounded who came to the hospital at the front were delighted, we had gotten everything we were trying for!”

“You were in the attack?”

“Unfortunately no, I was wounded the day before.”

“In the bombardment?”

“Yes, while we were filling up the trenches to make a way for the tanks toward the fort of Malmaison.”

“That must have been pretty constant thundering?”

“Yes, but very soon we did not think of it.  In the little bombardments you hear the shells coming and try to get to shelter, but, in those great days, when it is going on all the time, you can no longer distinguish anything, it is a continual noise, a kind of huge snoring.  Then you are quite calm.”

[Sidenote:  They do not speak of what they have done or seen.]

These are a few illustrations, a few rays of light, such as one still gets sometimes.  I do not know if they will become more frequent with the new evolution of the War.  They have been rare, and never followed by long expansiveness.  Our wounded soldier of the fourth year of the War did not like to speak of what he had done nor of what he had seen.  What may be the reasons for his silence?  In seeking to interpret them we penetrate a little into the psychology of this taciturn man.

[Sidenote:  The soldier plays an impersonal part.]

First, his impressions of the War are no longer fresh and now he would have some difficulty in analyzing them.  It is as with ourselves in a new country:  at first we have a thousand things to describe in our letters; after that nothing strikes us any longer.  This passage to a sort of unconsciousness is the easier for the soldier as he plays a more impersonal part in the War; a simple cell in a great organism, a simple wheel in an enormous machine, quite beyond his comprehension in its learned complication.  Catastrophes happen to him but no adventures:  he may be wounded, he may be killed, nothing else.  This is no material for fine stories.

A deeper reason for the silence of the witness, or rather the actor, in the great drama of the War, is a very just realization of the impossibility of conveying any idea of it to those who have never been there.  It is so very different from anything they know; so out of proportion to the normal life of human beings.

[Sidenote:  The wounded man does not like to think of war.]