shivering, sleepy soldiers without any intoxication or music in their
blood, looking wistfully after the civilian's train and its brightly
lighted windows as it disappeared behind the trees with a jolly blow of
its whistle? Who will obliterate the picture of that exchanging for
Death in the drab light of early dawn?

And supposing I could cross out that first endless night as something
settled and done with, would not the next morning remain, when our train
stopped at a switch in the middle of a wide, dewy meadow, and we were
told that we had to wait to let hospital trains go by? How shall I ever
banish the memory of those thick exhalations of lysol and blood blown
upon the happy fields from a dragon's nostrils? Won't I forever see
those endless serpents creeping up so indolently, as though surfeited
with mangled human flesh? From hundreds of windows white bandages
gleamed and dull, glassy eyes stared out. Lying, crouching, on top of
each other, body to body, they even hung on to the running-boards like
bloody bunches of grapes, an overflowing abundance of distress and
agony. And those wretched remains of strength and youth, those bruised
and battered men, looked with pity, yes, _with pity_, at our train.
Am I really sick because those glances of warm compassion from bleeding
cripples to sound, strapping young fellows burn in my soul with a fire
never to be extinguished? An apprehension sent a chill through our whole
train, the foreboding of a hell that one would rather run away from
wrapped in bloody bandages than go to meet whole and strong. And when
this shudder of apprehension has turned into reality, into experience
and memory, is it to be shaken off as long as such trains still meet
every day? A casual remark about the transfer of troops, news of fresh
battles inevitably recall this first actual contact with the war, just
as a certain note when struck will produce a certain tone, and I see the
tracks and ties and stones spattered with blood, shining in the early