CIVILIZATION 1914 - 1917

a selection from the chapter entitled: Civilization !-- pb n="271" --FIRST of all, I must know what you mean when you speak of civilization. I can quite well ask you this because you are an intelligent and an educated man, and then because you are always talking about this famous civilization. Before the war I was an assistant in an industrial laboratory. It was a good enough little place; but I assure you, if I have the melancholy luck to come out of this catastrophe alive, I shall never enter it again. The open country! Some spot where I shall never hear the whirring of your aeroplanes or any of those machines of yours that used to amuse me once, when I knew nothing about anything, but that now fill me with horror, because they are the very soul of this war, the principle and reason of this war! I hate the twentieth century, as I hate rotten !-- pb n="272" --Europe and the whole world on which this wretched Europe is spread out like a great spot of axle-grease. I know how ridiculous it is to flash out generalities like that; but, thunder! I don't say these things to every one, and besides, you might as well be ridiculous in one way as in another! I tell you that I shall go to the mountains and arrange it so that I shall be as much alone as possible. I had thought of going to live among the savages, among the black people, but there aren't even any real black people now. They all ride bicycles and want to be decorated. I shall not go to live with the black people. We have done all we could to lead them astray; I saw that clearly enough at Soissons. In the spring of this year I was at Soissons, with all the G.B.C. I suspect G.B.C. doesn't mean much to you; but that's another reason for quarreling with you about this civilization: it rebuilt the Tower of Babel, and soon men will have so debased their native tongue that they will have made a sort of telegraphic patois out of it, without savor and without beauty. !-- pb n="273" --The German retreat had carried the line over toward Vauxaillon and Laffaux, and there a good deal of fighting was going on. In one sector of the battle-field such a position as that of the mill of Laffaux was like a thorn at the bottom of a wound: it kept up the inflammation. Toward the beginning of May there was a great attack on this mill, and almost the whole of my own group had to go up into the line. "As for you, Sergeant," the officer told me, "you are to remain at the hospital and take charge of the stretchers of the A. C. A. We'll send you men." I knew all the subtleties of military language by this time. When I heard they were going to send me men, I knew perfectly well I wasn't going to get any one, and in actual fact I remained at the head of four men who had been rejected; they were a sort of cacochymic cretins for whom no one had any use. From Saturday on, the wounded began to arrive in groups of one hundred. And I began to !-- pb n="274" --pile them up methodically in the wards of the A.C.A. The truth is, the work didn't go well. My poor diseased stretcher-bearers did not pair off well, they stumbled like broken-kneed nags, and made the wounded scream. They would fish men out haphazard from the enormous pile waiting to be attended to, and the whole A. C. A. shuffled its feet with impatience, like a human flesh-factory that doesn't receive its raw material and revolves on itself, empty. I must explain to you what an A. C. A. is. In the slang of the war it's an "autochir," [Ambulance Chirurgicale Automobile] in other words, the most perfect thing in the line of an ambulance that has been invented. It's the last word in science; it follows the armies with motors, steam-engines, microscopes, laboratories--the whole lock, stock, and barrel of a modern hospital....