Think of fellows looking on, smoking, chaffing, busy with
something else. You have to, you know, or you would go all to pieces....
All the same, it is astonishing what human creatures can get used
to! I believe they could make themselves comfortable at the bottom of
a sewer. It really disgusts a man, for I was just the same myself. You
mustn't suppose that I was like this chap here, always staring at
a death's head. Like everybody else, I thought the whole thing was
idiotic; but life is like that, as far as I can see! ... We did what
we had to do, and let it go at that;--the end? Well, one is as good as
another, whether you lose your own skin or the war comes to an end, it
finishes it up all the same; and in the meantime you are alive, you
eat, you sleep, your bowels--excuse me, one must tell things as they
are!... Do you want to know what is at the bottom of it all, Sir? The
real truth is that we do not care for life, or not enough. In one of
your articles you say very truly that life is the great thing;--only
you wouldn't think so to see most people at this minute! Not much life
about them; they all seem drowsy, waiting for the last sleep; it looks
as if they said to themselves: 'We are flat on our backs now, no need
to stir an inch.' No, we don't make enough out of life.
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