Marthereau shakes his weary head, his fine eyes
shining like those of a puzzled and thoughtful hound. He sighs, saying:
"Oh, we're none of us so bad, but we're unlucky, poor devils all of us.
But we're too stupid, we're too stupid!"

As a rule, however, the human cry from these lowly fellows is anonymous.
We hardly know who has been speaking, for, often enough, all share in a
common thought. Born out of common trials, this thought brings them much
closer to the other unfortunates in the enemy trenches than to the rest
of the world away there in the rear. For visitors from the rear, "trench
tourists," for people in the rear, journalists "who exploit the public
misery," bellicose intellectuals, the soldiers unite in showing a
contempt which is free from violence but knows no bounds. To them has
come "the revelation of the great reality": a difference between human
beings, a difference far profounder and with far more impassable
barriers than those of race: the sharp, glaring, and inalterable
distinction, in the population of every country, between those who
profit and those who suffer, those who have been compelled to sacrifice
everything, those who give to the uttermost of their numbers, of their
strength, and of their martyrdom, those over whom the others march
forward smiling and successful.

One to whom this revelation has come, says bitterly: "That sort of thing
does not encourage one to die!"

But none the less this man meets his death bravely, meekly, like the
others.

* * * * *

The climax of the work is the last chapter, "The Dawn." It is like an
epilogue, the thought in which returns to join the thought in the
prologue, "The Vision," but enlarges upon that opening thought, just as
in a symphony the promise of the outset is fulfilled at the close.

"The Vision" describes the coming of the declaration of war, shows how
the tidings reached a sanatorium in Savoy, facing Mont Blanc. There,
these sick men, drawn thither from all the ends of the earth, "detached
from the affairs of the world and almost from life itself, ... as remote
from their fellow-men as if they already belonged to a future age, look
away into the distance, towards the incomprehensible land of the living
and the mad." They contemplate the flood below; they watch the
shipwrecked nations, grasping at straws. "These thirty millions of
slaves, hurled against one another by guilt and by mistake, hurled into
war and