Are not the paintings by Titian and Michael Angelo still hanging in the
museums centuries after Titian and Michael Angelo lived? And the
pictures that a dying man chiseled into my brain fourteen months ago
with the prodigious strength of his final agony--are they supposed to
disappear simply because the man that created them is lying in his
soldier's grave?

Who, when he reads or hears the word "woods," does not see some woods he
has once walked through or looked out on from a train window? Or when a
man speaks of his dead father does he not see the face that has long
been rotting in the grave appear again, now stern, now gentle, now in
the rigidity of the last moments? What would our whole existence be
without these visions which, each at its own word, rise up for moments
out of oblivion as if in the glare of a flashlight?

Sick? Of course. The world is sore, and will have no words or pictures
that do not have reference to the wholesale graves. Not for a moment can
the comrade within me join the rest of the dead, because everything that
happens is as a flashlight falling upon him. There's the newspaper each
morning to begin with: "Ships sunk," "Attacks repulsed." And immediately
the film reels off a whirl of gasping, struggling men, fingers rising
out of mountainous waves grasping for life once more, faces disfigured
by pain and fury. Every conversation that one overhears, every shop
window, every breath that is drawn is a reminder of the wholesale
carnage. Even the silence of the night is a reminder. Does not each tick
of the second-hand mark the death rattle of thousands of men? In order
to hear the hell raging yonder on the other side of the thick wall of
air, is it not enough to know of chins blown off, throats cut open, and
corpses locked in a death embrace?