But no--this endless, toilsome marching,
marching--always onward, yet never at the journey's end.
Who blames them if they fall by the way? Even the sergeant of the
division, passing their crumpled bodies by the roadside, becomes a
hypocrite if he kicks them into an obedience of their orders. In his
heart he might well wish to drop out as they have done. Who blames
them, too, if they slink off, hiding behind any cover that will
conceal their trembling bodies until the whole army has gone by?--who
blames them if they sham illness, lameness, anything that may be put
forward as an excuse to set them free?--who blames them if a wayside
cottage offers them shelter and, taking it, they leave the other poor
wretches to go on? Who blames them then? No one--no one with a heart
could do so. The great tragedy lies in the fact that they are left
to blame themselves.
And this--this is the way that Nature wages war--a civil war, that
is the worst, the most harrowing of all. She fights her own kith and
kin; she gives battle to the very conditions which she herself has
made. There is very seldom a hand-to-hand encounter. Only your French
Revolutions and your Russian Massacres mark the spots where the two
armies have met, where blood has flowed like wine from the broken
goblets of some thousands of lives.
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