of their strength, and of their martyrdom, those over whom the others march forward smiling and successful.
One to whom this revelation has come, says bitterly: "That sort of thing does not encourage one to die!"
But none the less this man meets his death bravely, meekly, like the others.
⁂
The climax of the work is the last chapter, "The Dawn." It is like an epilogue, the thought in which returns to join the thought in the prologue, "The Vision," but enlarges upon that opening thought, just as in a symphony the promise of the outset is fulfilled at the close.
"The Vision" describes the coming of the declaration of war, shows how the tidings reached a sanatorium in Savoy, facing Mont Blanc. There, these sick men, drawn thither from all the ends of the earth, "detached from the affairs of the world and almost from life itself, … as remote from their fellow-men as if they already belonged to a future age, look away into the distance, towards the incomprehensible land of the living and the mad." They contemplate the flood below; they watch the shipwrecked nations, grasping at straws. "These thirty millions of slaves, hurled against one another by guilt and by mistake, hurled into war and mud, uplift their human faces whose expression reveals at last a nascent will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is plain that the old world will be transformed by the alliance one day to be made between those whose numbers and whose miseries are infinite."
The concluding chapter, "The Dawn," is a picture of the "flood below," of the lowland inundated by the rain, a picture of the crumbling trenches. The spectacle resembles a scene from the book of Genesis. Germans and French are fleeing together from the scourge of the elements, or are sinking pell-mell into a common grave. Some of these castaways, taking refuge on ridges of mud that stand up amid the waters, begin to awaken from their
