e it. You can see nothing sordid and nothing ugly
here. The scale is too vast. Your mind refuses this coupling of infamy
with transcendent sorrow. It rejects all images but the one image of
desolation which is final and supreme. It is as if these forms had no
stability and no significance of their own; as if they were locked
together in one immense body and stirred or slept as one.

Two or three figures mount guard over this litter of prostrate forms.
They are old men and old women seated on chairs. They sit upright and
immobile, with their hands folded on their knees. Some of them have
fallen asleep where they sit. They are all rigid in an attitude of
resignation. They have the dignity of figures that will endure, like
that, for ever. They are Flamands.

This place is terribly still. There is hardly any rustling of the straw.
Only here and there the cry of a child fretting for sleep or for its
mother's breast. These people do not speak to each other. Half of them
are sound asleep, fixed in the posture they took when they dropped into
the straw. The others are drowsed with weariness, stupefied with sorrow.
On all these thousands of faces there is a mortal apathy. Their ruin is
complete. They have been stripped bare of the means of life and of all
likeness to living things. They do not speak. They do not think. They do
not, for the moment, feel. In all the four thousand--except for the
child crying yonder--there is not one tear.

And you who look at them cannot speak or think or feel either, and you
have not one tear. A path has been cleared through the straw from door
to door down the middle of the immense hall, a narrower track goes all
round it in front of the litters that are ranged under the walls, and
you are taken through and round the Show. You are to see it all. The
dear little Belgian lady, your guide, will not let you miss anything.
"_Regardez, Mademoiselle, ces deux petites filles. Qu'elles sont jolies,
les pauvres petites._" "_Voici deux jeunes maries, qui dorment. Regardez
l'homme; il tient encore la main de sa femme._"

You look. Yes. They are asleep. He is really holding her hand. "_Et ces
quatre petits enfants qui ont perdu leur pere et leur mere. C'est
triste, n'est-ce pas, Mademoiselle?_"

And you say, "_Oui, Mademoiselle. C'est bien triste._"

But you don't mean it. You don't feel it. You don't know whether it is
"_triste_" or not. You are not sure that "_triste_" is the word for it.
There are n