for a moment from the dream of hatred and of blood, raised one chant
along six miles, 'hymns, hymns, from end to end.'

Of the carnage in February there are a few precise notes, sufficient to
suggest the increasing horror. The narrative grows quicker; the reader
is aware of the pulse and the impetus of action, the imperious summons
of duty; the young sergeant is in charge of men, and has to execute
terrible tasks. But ever across the tumult and the slaughter, there are
moments of recollection and of compassion; and, in the evening of a day
of battle, what infinite tranquillity among the dead! At this period
there are no more notes of landscape effects; the description is of the
war, technical; otherwise the writer's thought is not of earth at all.
Once only, towards the end, we find a sorrowful recollection of himself,
a profound lamentation at the remembrance of bygone hopes, of bygone
work, of the immensity of the sacrifice. 'This war is long, too long for
those who had something else to do in the world! Why am I so sacrificed,
when so many others, not my equals, are spared? Yet I had something
worth doing to do in the world!' Most touching is that sigh, even more
touching than the signs of greatness in his soul, for it suddenly
breathes an anguish long controlled. It is a human weakness--our own
weakness--that is at last confessed, on the eve of a Passion, as in the
Divine example. At rare times such a question, in the constant sight of
death, in fatigue and weariness, in the long distress of rain and mud,
checks in him the impulse of life and of spiritual desire. He was
himself the young plant of which he writes, growing, creating fragrance
and breaking into flower, sure of God, feeling Him alive within itself.
But all at once it knows frost is coming and the threat of unpitying
things. What if the universe were void, what if in the infinity of the
exterior world there were nothing, across the splendid vision, but an
insensate fatality? What if sacrifice itself were also a delusion? 'Dark