Back of them were thousands and thousands of
comrades groaning on hospital beds from which they would probably never
rise. Thousands and thousands were hidden forever in the bosom of the
Earth moistened by their death agony--fatal land which, upon receiving a
hail of projectiles, brought forth a harvest of bristling crosses!
War now showed itself to Desnoyers with all its cruel hideousness. He
had been accustomed to speak of it heretofore as those in robust health
speak of death, knowing that it exists and is horrible, but seeing it
afar off . . . so far off that it arouses no real emotion. The explosion
of the shells were accompanying their destructive brutality with a
ferocious mockery, grotesquely disfiguring the human body. He saw
wounded objects just beginning to recover their vital force who were but
rough skeletons of men, frightful caricatures, human rags, saved from
the tomb by the audacities of science--trunks with heads which were
dragged along on wheeled platforms; fragments of skulls whose brains
were throbbing under an artificial cap; beings without arms and without
legs, resting in the bottom of little wagons, like bits of plaster
models or scraps from the dissecting room; faces without noses that
looked like skulls with great, black nasal openings. And these half-men
were talking, smoking, laughing, satisfied to see the sky, to feel
the caress of the sun, to have come back to life, dominated by that
sovereign desire to live which trustingly forgets present misery in the
confident hope of something better.
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