"Why does it go on?"
"Who knows?"
"Will we win?"
"No one can win. The Redbirds will keep coming. We keep killing!"
"The Powers are happy though. Fifty bodies to the marts. Counting
yesterday's casualties, that's over three hundred to the marts since
this battle started."
"And how many since the war started?"
"Who knows? When wasn't there a war, pal? What the hell would a guy do
around here if there wasn't a war on?"
Danton felt hands on his ankles and wrists. He forced limpness down his
body and felt himself tossed among the dead. He was hardly noticed at
all, dead or otherwise. His uniform was torn, covered with blood and
dirt until it looked like any other uniform. He must look pretty bad to
be taken for dead.
Swarms of insects, drawn by the blood, settled in clouds. The amtrac
jerked forward. Danton saw the drivers sitting up there like gray
plaster figurines. One of the men started to mumble a song, a kind of
chant, more like a dirge.
"Shut up! You'll get us shot!"
"Borkan's back there. He can't hear."
Danton listened. His stomach went hollow and icy at the song. It was
old. It was full of ghosts, ghost treads, and ghost shadows marching
out of the past, out of the present.
"The men of the tattered battalion, which fights 'till it stumbles
and dies,
Dazed with the scream of the battle, the din and damned glare and
the cries,
The men with the broken heads backward, and the blood running out
of their eyes!"
"Shut up!"
"The Powers have all of the music, the glory and color and gold;
Ours be a handful of ashes, a bountiful mouthful of mould."
"Shut up, I tell you! We'll be shot! If you--"
"Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the
cold--"
The song faded slowly, died out. It seemed to die of weariness, to run
down. And Danton kept on hearing it--circling mournfully through his
head like swirling muddy water round a stake.
One thing he was seeing now, graphically so that he would never
forget: Wars weren't all the same. Sometimes fighting-men hated war.
He had known only the swift clean war, the septic war, a gigantic
street-cleaning machine with a ray gun in front and a rotary brush in
the back, with individuals turned abruptly into the earth from which
they had come, and no one knowing the difference.
But in different times and places, wars could be different.
* * * * *