and the smell of muck and blood making foetid
the air. He was in the mood which curses God and dies; for he was
devout--a Catholic, and still went to Mass. And God had betrayed the
earth, and Jean Liotard. All the enormities he had seen in his two years
at the front--the mouthless mangled faces, the human ribs whence rats
would steal; the frenzied tortured horses, with leg or quarter rent
away, still living; the rotted farms, the dazed and hopeless peasants;
his innumerable suffering comrades; the desert of no-man's land; and all
the thunder and moaning of war; and the reek and the freezing of war;
and the driving--the callous perpetual driving, by some great Force
which shovelled warm human hearts and bodies, warm human hopes and loves
by the million into the furnace; and over all, dark sky without a break,
without a gleam of blue, or lift anywhere--all this enclosed him, lying
in the golden heat, so that not a glimmer of life or hope could get at
him. Back into it all again! Back into it, he who had been through forty
times the hell that the "_majors_" ever endured, five hundred times the
hell ever glimpsed at by those _deputes_, safe with their fat salaries,
and their gabble about victory and the lost provinces, and the future of
the world--the _Canaille!_ Let them allow the soldiers, whose lives they
spent like water--"_les camarades_" on both sides--poor devils who bled,
and froze, and starved, and sweated--let them suffer these to make the
peace! Ah! What a peace that would be--its first condition, all the
sacred politicians and pressmen hanging in rows in every country; the
mouth fighters, the pen fighters, the fighters with other men's blood!
Those comfortable citizens would never rest till there was not a young
man with whole limbs left in France! Had he not killed enough Boches,
that they might leave him and his tired heart in peace? He thought of
his first charge; of how queer and soft that Boche body felt when his
bayonet went through; and another, and another. Ah! he had "_joliment_"
done his duty that day! And something wrenched at his ribs. They were
only Boches, but their wives and children, their mothers--faces
questioning, faces pleading for them--pleading with whom? Ah! Not with
him! Who was he that had taken those lives, and others since, but a poor
devil without a life himself, without the right to breathe or move
except to the orders of a Force which had no mind, which had no heart,
had nothing but a