At every moment you are thrown violently back into your littleness, you are punished for the least action which comes out of it, or slain by the order of your masters.
It is forbidden you to speak when you would unite yourself with the brother who is touching you.

The silence of steel reigns around you.
Your thoughts must be only profound endurance.

Discipline is indispensable for the multitude to be melted into a single army; and in spite of the vague kinship which is sometimes set up between you and your nearest chief, the machine-like order paralyzes you first, so that your body may be the better made to move in accordance with the rhythm of the rank and the regiment--into which, nullifying all that is yourself, you pass already as a sort of dead man.
"They gather us together but they separate us!" cries a voice from the past.
If there are some who escape through the meshes, it means that such "slackers" are also influential.

They are uncommon, in spite of appearances, as the influential are.

You, the isolated man, the ordinary man, the lowly thousand-millionth of humanity, you evade nothing, and you march right to the end of all that happens, or to the end of yourself.
You will be crushed.