Page:Armistice Day.djvu/160

138 about war—nothing. The pen of the sternest realist could not exaggerate the loathsomeness of it. This modern civilized warfare, this warfare of mechanics, is the worst form of all. When I first went to the western front, I expected in some degree to be thrilled and to feel some "inspiration to write about it." I came away cold, depressed, mentally exhausted with the illimitable destructiveness of the thing. You go to the front, and for days you see only destruction, disease, decay. Nothing growing, nothing blooming, nothing constructive. It is not so much the flying death that is terrible; it is the rotting dead. Trees rotting, houses rotting, crops rotting, machines rotting, horses rotting, men rotting.

That is war. Not bugles and battles, but mud and putrefaction. The flying death whistles, and you flatten down into the mud and putrefaction for an instant to escape lying in it forever. You do this again and again and again until you cease to care. Your mind is already rotting, your soul is rotting.

I saw some of our boys who had been over the top three times in twenty-four hours. The skin of their faces was pulled tight over the bone. Their eyes were the eyes of wild animals hunted to the point of utter weariness. Only the gashes which were mouths showed the will to go on. All men are sometimes afraid under fire; probably