He was a Russian, a teacher of
languages in Paris at the outbreak of the war, and had joined the French
Army.
"It is not only courage," he said, "that War brings out. It brings out
vile things too. Oh, I'm not thinking merely of the Boches. That's the
cant of every nation: that all the heroism is on one side and all the
brutality on the other. Take men from anywhere and some of them will be
devils. War gives them their opportunity, brings out the beast. Can you
wonder at it? You teach a man to plunge a bayonet into the writhing
flesh of a fellow human being, and twist it round and round and jamb it
further in, while the blood is spurting from him like a fountain. What
are you making of him but a beast? A man's got to be a beast before he
can bring himself to do it. I have seen things done by our own men in
cold blood, the horror of which will haunt my memory until I die. But of
course, we hush it up when it happens to be our own people."
He ceased speaking. No one seemed inclined to break the silence.
They remained confused in her memory, these talks among the wounded men
in the low, dimly lighted hut that had become her world.
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