CHAPTER xxxi

months passed bringing neither mercy nor
respite, but only fresh hatreds to corrode the
heart as war swept civilization aside and men bred
and reared up in the knowledge of peace were now
forced to the fearful knowledge of killing. One after
another such men left Saint Loup, for the most part
simple, ignorant fellows who had seen only quiet and
seemly death, if indeed death had ever crossed their
vision; and one after another they must kill or be
killed, since not always are battles won by ideals —
they are sometimes won by self-preservation. And
yet through the welter of anger and blood, of agony,
mutilation and horror, there would shine out
triumphantly many a deed of selfless and thus very
perfect courage, as the finite claims of the quaking
flesh must give place to the infinite claims of the spirit.
And in this there would be neither friends nor foes,
but only those who gave of their best and became as
brothers because of that giving.
Completely bewildered by his own emotions which
grew daily more violent and more contradictory,
Christophe struggled to find the inward peace that
Jan and the Cure Martel had found; what they had
attained to, Christophe must seek with something
approaching desperation. For now there were times
when he could -not endure a compassion that seemed to
be all-embracing, a compassion that saw but one
suffering whole on those terrible blood-drenched
battlefields, that perceived neither warring rulers nor
z 353