“We stood on some steps, looking down into that cellar. It was a dark hole, illumined dimly by a lantern, I think. I caught sight of a little heap of huddled bodies. Two soldiers, still unwounded, dragged three of them out and handed them up to us. The work of getting those three men into the first ambulance seemed to us interminable; it was really no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.
“I had lost consciousness of myself. Something outside myself, as it seemed, was saying that there was no way of escape; that it was monstrous to suppose that all these bursting shells would not smash the ambulance to bits and finish the agony of the wounded, and that death was very hideous. I remember thinking also how ridiculous it was for men to kill one another like this and to make such hells on earth.”
CHAPTER XXII
WHAT THE MEN IN THE TRENCHES WRITE HOME
[SOBERING REALITIES OF BATTLE] — [“WAR IS TERRIBLE”]—[THE COMMON ENEMY, DEATH]—“A WASTEFUL WAR”—[“SAME PAIR OF BLUE EYES”]—[FIGHTING WITHOUT HATE.]
Life at the front is not all marching and fighting by any means: there are long days and nights of waiting in which though it be
“Theirs not to reason why”
the soldiers have abundant time to reflect upon the grim fatality of war and the hideousness of the carnage. They are continually facing death, and though many of them, perhaps most of them, become inured to the sights of human slaughter, others cannot fail to be impressed by the stark, white faces of the fallen—friends and foes alike. Sights more horrible than perhaps they could have imagined are burned into their minds, never to be effaced.
Naturally some of their reflections find expression in the letters home, when the soldier is more or less off guard. There we get an “inside view” of the war which does much to offset the ruthlessness of rulers and restore one’s faith in the essential humanity of men.