of some great justice; or else he must love war for its own sake.
But we have no faith; we do not love war and we know nothing about it.
Yet men fight and die believing neither in the cause of God nor in the
great justice; men who do not love war, and who die none the less with
their faces to the enemy.... Many, unawakened, go to their deaths
without thinking; but others die with anguish in their hearts, anguish
at the futile sacrifice and at their realisation of the madness of
men."

p. 20. In the trenches. "Everyone was cursing the war, everyone hated
it. Some were saying: 'Frenchmen or Germans, they are men like
ourselves, they suffer as we do in body and in mind. Do not they, too,
dream of the home-coming?' Passing through a village and seeing a man
unfit for service because he had lost two fingers, the soldiers had said
to him: 'You lucky devil; you needn't go to the war!'"

p. 21. "I am not one of those who believe in the coming of Beauty,
Goodness, and Justice.... Nor am I one of those who regild the idols of
the past, symbols of obscure forces which it behoves us to worship in
silence. I am neither submissive nor a believer.--I love Pity, for we
are unfortunates, and it does us good to be solaced, even if we be
executioners and butchers. If we do not need consolation for the ills we
are suffering, we need consolation for the ills we have done or shall
do. We need solace because we have to make others suffer, to kill and be
killed."

p. 22. "Lying prone, while the shells whistle overhead, I think. Die!
Why should we die on this battlefield?... Die for civilisation, for the
freedom of the nations? Words, words, words. We are dying because men
are wild beasts killing one another. We are dying for bales of
merchandise; we are dying for squabbles about money.--Art, civilisation,
and culture are equally beautiful, be they Romance, Teutonic, or Slav.
We should love them all!"

p. 59. "With Baudelaire, we detest the weapons of warriors.... The great
epoch was the one in which we were living before the war. The flapping
of the banners, the long files of soldiers, the roaring of the guns, and
the blare of the bugles--these things cannot inspire us with admiration
for collective murder and for the monstrous enslavement of the
peoples.... Young men lying to-day in your graves, they strew flowers on
your tombs and proclaim you immortal. What to you are empty words? They
will pass even more quickly than you have passed!