y streets while waiting for taps to
sound. Jean, stiff and sore after his day's march, went and sat down a
little way from Maurice, whose murmured words fell indistinctly upon his
unlistening ear, for he, too, had vague, half formed reflections of his
own that were stirring sluggishly in the recesses of his muddy, torpid
mind.

Maurice was a believer in war in the abstract; he considered it one of
the necessary evils, essential to the very existence of nations. This
was nothing more than the logical sequence of his course in embracing
those theories of evolution which in those days exercised such a potent
influence on our young men of intelligence and education. Is not life
itself an unending battle? Does not all nature owe its being to a series
of relentless conflicts, the survival of the fittest, the maintenance
and renewal of force by unceasing activity; is not death a necessary
condition to young and vigorous life? And he remembered the sensation
of gladness that had filled his heart when first the thought occurred
to him that he might expiate his errors by enlisting and defending his
country on the frontier. It might be that France of the plebiscite,
while giving itself over to the Emperor, had not desired war; he
himself, only a week previously, had declared it to be a culpable and
idiotic measure. There were long discussions concerning the right of a
German prince to occupy the throne of Spain; as the question gradually
became more and more intricate and muddled it seemed as if everyone must
be wrong, no one right; so that it was impossible to tell from which
side the provocation came, and the only part of the entire business that
was clear to the eyes of all was the inevitable, the fatal law which
at a given moment hurls nation against nation. Then Paris was convulsed
from center to circumference; he remembered that burning summer's night,
the tossing, struggling human tide that filled the boulevards, the bands
of men brandishing torches before the Hotel de Ville, and yelling:
"On to Berlin! on to Berlin!" and he seemed to hear the strains of the
Marseillaise, sung by a beautiful, stately woman with the face of a
queen, wrapped in the folds of a flag, from her elevation on the box of
a coach. Was it all a lie, was it true that the heart of Paris had not
beaten then? And then, as was always the case with him, that condition
of nervous excitation had been succeeded by long hours of doubt and
disgust; there were al