themselves bellowed into the hurricane of the drumfire so as to keep
from bursting from inner stress. They come loaded down, like beasts of
burden, with horrors, the astonished looks of bayoneted, dying foes on
their conscience--and they don't dare open their mouths because
everybody, wife and child included, grinds out the same tune, a flow of
curious questions about shells, gas bombs and bayonet attacks. So the
days of the furlough expire, one by one, and the return to death is
almost a deliverance from the shame of being a coward in disguise among
the friends at home, to whom dying and killing have become mere
commonplaces.

So be it, my dear doctors! It is an honor to be charged with madness if
those villains are not called mad who, to save their own necks, have so
gloriously hardened the people's hearts and abolished pity and implanted
pride in the enemy's suffering, instead of acting as the one
intermediary between distress and power and arousing the conscience of
the world by going to the most frequented places and shouting _"Man
Sal-ad"_ through a megaphone so loud and so long that at length all
those whose fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, have gone to the corpse-
factory will be seized with terror and all the throats in the world will
be _one_ echo to "Man Sal-ad!"

If you were here right now, dear doctors, I could show you my comrade,
summoned to this room in the very body by the flames of hate against
news from the front and against the indifference of the hinterland. I
feel him standing behind my back, but his face is lying on the white
sheet in front of me, like a faint water-mark, and my pen races
frantically so as to cover his eyes at least with letters and hide their
reproachful stare.