"What does it mean, at the bottom of it, all this?—all this that you can't even give a name to?"
They snarled and growled like wild beasts on that sort of ice-floe contended for by the elements, in their dismal disguise of ragged mud. So huge was the protest thus rousing them in revolt that it choked them.
"We're made to live, not to be done in like this!"
"Men are made to be husbands, fathers—men, what the devil!—not beasts that hunt each other and cut each other's throats and make themselves stink like all that."
"And yet, everywhere—everywhere—there are beasts, savage beasts or smashed beasts. Look, look!"
I shall never forget the look of those limitless lands wherefrom the water had corroded all color and form, whose contours crumbled on all sides under the assault of the liquid putrescence that flowed across the broken bones of stakes and wire and framing; nor, rising above those things amid the sullen Stygian immensity, can I ever forget the vision of the thrill of reason, logic and simplicity that suddenly shook these men like a fit of madness.
I could see them agitated by this idea—that to try to live one's life on earth and to be happy is not only a right but a duty, and even an ideal and a virtue; that the only end of social life is to make easy the inner life of every one.
"To live!"—"All of us!"—"You!"—"Me!"
"No more war—ah, no!—it's too stupid—worse than that, it's too—"
For a finishing echo to their half-formed thought a saying came to the mangled and miscarried murmur of the mob from a filth-crowned face that I saw arise from the level of the earth—"Two armies fighting each other—that's like one great army committing suicide!"