on. All the same you are my enemy," she added stubbornly.
The Uhlan laughed. "Who has made me so, Madame? Not myself, surely." And then after a little pause, he added with a kind of desperation, "No, I am like all the others. I have nothing to do with it. We are all caught, Madame, . . . hopelessly caught in one great web spun by a monster. Ah, what a monster!"
In the distant stable arose suddenly the sound of two horses quarreling. There was a violent kicking . . . a squealing that was savage and implacable.
"We are not even like that," he said. "It is not even that we bite and kick. . . . We shoot each other at a distance. You, Madame, perhaps have friends among the men I am fighting. I kill them and they me only because the first who shoots is the safest. You know the artillerymen kill men they never even see." He spat suddenly. "Bah! It is mechanics . . . all mechanics . . . machinery, you understand, which they make in great roaring factories. They kill men in factories in order to kill more men on the battlefield. What is there in that?"
Again she made no answer to his question. The quarreling horses had been separated and their squealing silenced. There was only the overpowering stillness once more, a stillness unearthly in quality which lifted all that it enveloped upon a new plane, determined by new values. Life, death, reality, dreams—all these things were confused and yet amazingly clear, as if the whole had been pierced by a single beam of cold white light.
