able of shouldering a weapon.
Again--and above all--every war was reduced to two or three pitched
battles, that is to say, two or three culminating moments; immense
efforts, but efforts of a few hours, or a day at most, towards which
the combatants directed all the vigour and all the heroism accumulated
during long weeks or months of preparation and waiting. Afterwards,
whether the result was victory or defeat, the fighting was over;
relaxation, respite and rest followed; men went back to their homes.
Destiny must not be defied more than once; and they knew that in the
most terrible affray the chances of escaping death were as twenty to
one.

3

Nowadays, everything is changed; and death itself is no longer what it
was. Formerly, you looked it in the face, you knew whence it came and
who sent it to you. It had a dreadful aspect, but one that remained
human. Its ways were not unknown: its long spells of sleep, its brief
awakenings, its bad days and dangerous hours. At present, to all these
horrors it adds the great, intolerable fear of mystery. It no longer
has any aspect, no longer has habits or spells of sleep and it is
never still. It is always ready, always on the watch, everywhere
present, scattered, intangible and dense, stealthy and cowardly,
diffuse, all-encompassing, innumerous, looming at every point of the
horizon, rising from the waters and falling from the skies,
indefatigable, inevitable, filling the whole of space and time for
days, weeks and months without a minute's lull, without a second's
intermission. Men live, move and sleep in the meshes of its fatal web.
They know that the least step to the right or left, a head bowed or
lifted, a body bent or upright is seen by its eyes and draws its
thunder.

Hitherto we had no example of this preponderance of the destructive
forces. We should never have believed that man's nerves could resist
so great a trial. The nerves of the bravest man are tempered to face
death for the space of a second, but not to live in the hourly
expectation of death and nothing else. Heroism was once a sharp and
rugged peak, reached for a moment but soon quitted, for
mountain-peaks are not inhabitable. To-day it is a boundless plain, as
uninhabitable as the peaks; but we are not permitted to descend from
it. And so, at the very moment when man appeared most exhausted and
enervated by the comforts and vices of civilization, at the moment
when he was happiest and therefore most se