age had reached me that a friend had been
killed in battle. A man strong and active in body, intensely alive and
sensitive in soul. One of those whom we can never think of as dead, so
wholly do they belong to life.

The blind man stopped at a little distance. He chose a place where the
trees have been cleared and the snow mountains spread themselves for
the feast of the eyes of those who can see. He put his milk-can and his
staff on the ground, and stood for a moment with head bowed as if
crushed by his infirmity. Then he threw up his hands and raised his
head, as though a sudden vision had come to him--his whole body tense
and expectant, like that of a man who strains every nerve to catch a
message from the hills across the valley. For a minute he remained
still, as if receiving something in his hands borne by the silence. Then
he picked up his staff and his can. He turned round and faced me for a
moment before resuming his journey. There was a smile on his lips and a
strange radiance in his sightless eyes, and I wished that I, too, might
see what he had seen.

For the darkness with which we are afflicted lay heavily around me, and
seemed greater even than the blindness of the eyes. The war has brought
the mystery of death to our hearts with pitiless insistence. Every
bullet that finds its mark kills more than the soldier who falls. Ties
of love and friendship are shattered hour by hour and day by day, as the
guns of war roar out their message of destruction. We are all partners
in a gigantic Dance of Death such as Holbein never imagined. To him
Death was the wily and insistent enemy of human activity and hope, a spy
watching in the doorway for an opportunity to snap the thread of life.
We have cajoled and magnified Death until he has outgrown all natural
proportions; through centuries of war and preparation for war we have
appealed to him to settle our national differences. We have outdone the
earthquake and the cyclone in valid claims upon his power and presence;
we have outwitted pestilence and famine in our efforts to hold his
attention. We, of the twentieth century, have attained mastery in the
art of killing. We kill by fire and bursting shell, we kill by mine and
gas. We dive under the surface of the water to surprise our enemy, we
fly in the air and sow fire and devastation upon the earth. We have
chained science to our chariot of Death, we have made giant tools of
killing which mow down regiments of men at gr