Next, our floor was covered
with dripping men, five of them unbandaged. Shells and wounds were
connected in my mind by that close succession.
No one was secure in that wrecked village of Pervyse. Along the streets,
homeless dogs prowled, pigeons circled, hungry cats howled. Behind the
trenches, the men had buried their dead and had left great mounds where
they had tried to bury the horses. Shells dropped every day, some days
all day. I have seen men running along the streets, flattening
themselves against a house whenever they heard the whirr of a shell.
It is not easy to eat, and sleep, and live together in close quarters,
sometimes with rush work, sometimes through severer hours of aimless
waiting. Again and again, we became weary of one another, impatient over
trifles.
[Illustration: BELGIAN SOLDIERS TELEPHONING TO AN ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN THE
APPROACH OF A GERMAN TAUBE.
These lookout posts for observing and directing gun fire carry a
portable telephone, adapted to sudden changes of position.]
What war does is to reveal human nature. It does not alter it. It
heightens the brutality and the heroism. Selfishness shines out nakedly
and kindliness is seen clearer than in routine peace days. War brings
out what is inside the person. Sentimental pacifists sit around three
thousand miles away and say, "War brutalizes men," and when I hear them
I think of the English Tommies giving me their little stock of
cigarettes for the Belgian soldiers.
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