Paradis, possessed by his notion, waved his hand towards the wide unspeakable landscape, and looking steadily on it repeated his sentence, "War is that. It is that everywhere. What are we, we chaps, and what's all this here? Nothing at all. All we can see is only a speck. You've got to remember that this morning there's three thousand kilometers of equal evils, or nearly equal, or worse."
"And then," said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognize even by his voice, "to-morrow it begins again. It began again the day before yesterday, and all the days before that!"
With an effort as if he was tearing the ground, the chasseur dragged his body out of the earth where he had molded a depression like an oozing coffin, and sat in the hole. He blinked his eyes and tried to shake the balance of mud from his face, and said, "We shall come out of it again this time. And who knows, p'raps we shall come out of it again to-morrow! Who knows?"
Paradis, with his back bent under mats of earth and clay, was trying to convey his idea that the war cannot be imagined or measured in terms of time and space. "When one speaks of the whole war," he said, thinking aloud, "it's as if you said nothing at all—the words are strangled. We're here, and we look at it all like blind men."
A bass voice rolled to us from a little farther away, "No, one cannot imagine it."
At these words a burst of harsh laughter tore itself from some one. "How could you imagine it, to begin with, if you hadn't been there?"
"You'd have to be mad," said the chasseur.
Paradis leaned over a sprawling outspread mass beside him and said, "Are you asleep?"
"No, but I'm not going to budge." The smothered and terror-struck mutter issued instantly from the mass that was covered with a thick and slimy horse-cloth, so indented that it seemed to have been trampled. "I'll tell you why. I believe my belly's shot through. But I'm not sure, and I daren't find out."