eyes seen a Frenchman or an Englishman unless he was a
prisoner. It is not so much pleasure--fighting like this."

I might have told the young Bavarian lieutenant of other places where I
had been--places where the dead lay for days unburied. I might have
told him there was nothing particularly pretty or particularly edifying
about the process of being killed. Death, I take it, is never a very
tidy proceeding; but in battle it acquires an added unkemptness. Men
suddenly and sorely stricken have a way of shrinking up inside their
clothes; unless they die on the instant they have a way of tearing their
coats open and gripping with their hands at their vitals, as though to
hold the life in; they have a way of sprawling their legs in grotesque
postures; they have a way of putting their arms up before their faces as
though at the very last they would shut out a dreadful vision. Those
contorted, twisted arms with the elbows up, those spraddled stark legs,
and, most of all, those white dots of shirts--those I had learned to
associate in my own mind with the accomplished fact of mortality upon
the field.

I might have told him of sundry field hospitals which I had lately
visited. I could recreate in my memory, as I shall be able to recreate
it as long as I live and have my senses, a certain room in a certain
schoolhouse in a French town where seven men wriggled and fought in the
unspeakable torments of lockjaw; and another room filled to capacity
with men who had been borne there because there was nothing humanly to
be done for them, and who now lay very quietly, their suetty-gray faces
laced with tiny red stripes of fever, and their paling eyes staring up
at nothing at all; and still another room given over entirely to stumps
of men, who lacked each a leg or an arm, or a leg and an arm, or both
legs or both arms; and still a fourth room wherein were men--and boys
too--all blinded, all learning to grope about in the everlasting black
night which would be their portion through all their days. Indeed for
an immediate illustration of the products of the business toward which
he was hastening I might have taken him by the arm and led him across
two sets of tracks and shown him men in the prime of life who were
hatcheled like flax, and mauled like blocks, and riddled like sieves,
and macerated out of the living image of their Maker.

But I did none of these things. He had a picture of something uplifting
and splendid before