"Ah, my boy, if all we've gone through wasn't the end of this great calamity! I value my life; I've got my wife, my family, my home around them; I've got schemes for my life afterwards, mind you. Well, all the same, if this wasn't the end of it, I'd rather die."
"I'm going to die." The echo came at that moment exactly from Paradis' neighbor, who no doubt had examined the wound in his belly. "I'm sorry on account of my children."
"It's on account of my children that I'm not sorry," came a murmur from somewhere else. "I'm dying, so I know what I'm saying, and I say to myself, 'They'll have peace.'"
"Perhaps I shan't die," said another, with a quiver of hope that he could not restrain even in the presence of the doomed, "but I shall suffer. Well, I say, 'more's the pity,' and I even say 'that's all right'; and I shall know how to stick more suffering if I know it's for something."
"Then we'll have to go on fighting after the war?"
"Yes, p'raps—"
"You want more of it, do you?"
"Yes, because I want no more of it," the voice grunted. "And p'raps it'll not be foreigners that we've got to fight?"
"P'raps, yes—"
A still more violent blast of wind shut our eyes and choked us. When it had passed, and we saw the volley take flight across the plain, seizing and shaking its muddy plunder and furrowing the water in the long gaping trenches—long as the grave of an army—we began again.