Then you are quite calm."
[Sidenote: They do not speak of what they have done or seen.]
These are a few illustrations, a few rays of light, such as one still
gets sometimes. I do not know if they will become more frequent with the
new evolution of the War. They have been rare, and never followed by
long expansiveness. Our wounded soldier of the fourth year of the War
did not like to speak of what he had done nor of what he had seen. What
may be the reasons for his silence? In seeking to interpret them we
penetrate a little into the psychology of this taciturn man.
[Sidenote: The soldier plays an impersonal part.]
First, his impressions of the War are no longer fresh and now he would
have some difficulty in analyzing them. It is as with ourselves in a new
country: at first we have a thousand things to describe in our letters;
after that nothing strikes us any longer. This passage to a sort of
unconsciousness is the easier for the soldier as he plays a more
impersonal part in the War; a simple cell in a great organism, a simple
wheel in an enormous machine, quite beyond his comprehension in its
learned complication. Catastrophes happen to him but no adventures: he
may be wounded, he may be killed, nothing else. This is no material for
fine stories.
A deeper reason for the silence of the witness, or rather the actor, in
the great drama of the War, is a very just realization of the
impossibility of conveying any idea of it to those who have never been
there.
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