But at least I knew, as I watched those
smouldering death-fires, that no individual corpse among them could
be brought in guilty of the crime which had caused this war, and that
not a soul hovering above that mass of meat could be made
responsible at the judgment seat of God. They had obeyed orders,
they had marched to the hymn of the Fatherland, they believed, as
we did, in the righteousness of their cause. But like the dead bodies
of the Frenchmen and the Englishmen who lay quite close, they had
been done to death by the villainy of statecraft and statesmen,
playing one race against another as we play with pawns in a game of
chess. The old witchcraft was better than this new witchcraft, and not
so fraudulent in its power of duping the ignorant masses.
My guide had no such sentiment. As he led me through a fringe of
forest land he told me his own adventures, and heaped curses upon
the enemy.
He had killed one of them with his own hand. As he was walking on
the edge of a wood a Solitary Uhlan came riding over the fields,
below the crest of a little hill. He was one of the outposts of the strong
force in Crepy-en-Valois, and had lost his way to that town. He
demanded guidance, and to point his remarks pricked his lance at the
chest of the garde champetre.
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