26/53 "Mel, I'm still the boy, your schoolmate, who used to pull the bow off your braid.... I am that boy still in heart, with all the war upon my head, with the years between then and now. I've lived the whole gamut--the fresh call of war to youth, glorious, but God! as false as stairs of sand--the change of blood, hard, long, brutal, debasing labor of hands, of body, of mind to learn to kill--to survive and kill--and go on to kill.... I've seen the marching of thousands of soldiers--the long strange tramp, tramp, tramp, the beat, beat, beat, the roll of drums, the call of bugles, the boom of cannon in the dark, the lightnings of hell flaring across the midnight skies, the thunder and chaos and torture and death and pestilence and decay--the hell of war. |