It isn't war."

"It's better than that," said another. "It's the eating-up of
a people. They come and they fill the trenches and they die,
and they die; and they send more and _those_ die. We do the
same, of course, but--look!"

He pointed to the large deliberate smoke-heads renewing
themselves along that yellowed beach. "That is the frontier
of civilization. They have all civilization against them
--those brutes yonder. It's not the local victories of the old
wars that we're after. It's the barbarian--all the barbarian.
Now, you've seen the whole thing in little. Come and look at
our children."

SOLDIERS IN CAVES

We left that tall tree whose fruits are death ripened and
distributed at the tingle of small bells. The observer
returned to his maps and calculations; the telephone-boy
stiffened up beside his exchange as the amateurs went out of
his life. Some one called down through the branches to ask
who was attending to--Belial, let us say, for I could not
catch the gun's name. It seemed to belong to that terrific
new voice which had lifted itself for the second or third
time. It appeared from the reply that if Belial talked too
long he would be dealt with from another point miles away.

The troops we came down to see were at rest in a chain of
caves which had begun life as quarries and had been fitted up