, they seem to see a great livid plain unrolled, which to their
seeing is made of mud and water, while figures appear and fast fix
themselves to the surface of it, all blinded and borne down with filth,
like the dreadful castaways of shipwreck. And it seems to them that
these are soldiers.

The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and
scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who
strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty million
slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt and error,
uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning Will. The
future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly certain that
the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose number and whose
misery alike are infinite will transform the old world.

II

In the Earth

THE great pale sky is alive with thunderclaps. Each detonation reveals
together a shaft of red falling fire in what is left of the night, and
a column of smoke in what has dawned of the day. Up there--so high and
so far that they are heard unseen--a flight of dreadful birds goes
circling up with strong and palpitating cries to look down upon the
earth.

The earth! It is a vast and water-logged desert that begins to take
shape under the long-drawn desolation of daybreak. There are pools and
gullies where the bitter breath of earliest morning nips the water and
sets it a-shiver; tracks traced by the troops and the convoys of the
night in these barren fields, the lines of ruts that glisten in the
weak light like steel rails, mud-masses with broken stakes protruding
from them, ruined trestles, and bushes of wire in tangled coils. With
its slime-beds and puddles, the plain might be an endless gray sheet
that floats on the sea and has here and there gone under. Though no
rain is falling, all is drenched, oozing, washed out and drowned, and
even the wan light seems to flow.

Now you can make out a network of long ditches where the lave of the
night still lingers. It is the trench. It is carpeted at bottom with a
layer of slime that liberates the foot at each step with a sticky
sound; and by each dug-out it smells of the night's excretions. The
holes themselves, as you stoop to peer in, are foul of breath.

I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge
and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are "us."
We are muffled like Eskimos. F