'These nights in which the living, who so soon will be the dead, clutch at the rags which cover them, and shriek with rage and fear as though they saw an enemy descend on them! These nights in which one hears the childlike sobs of young Palot, who is delirious, and who in his long agony calls on his mother, "Mamma! Mamma!"
'They will ring for ever in my ears those two piteous words which through three whole nights fill that wretched place with their unpitied lament. A lament, low and tender at first, broken with choking tears, ending in screams which make one's hair stand up on one's skull with horror. The desperate screams of a perishing life which has lost all sense and measure of things or of time, of one who knows only that he will die, and in one supreme appeal protests against his severance from those he loves.'
And the youth Palot dies in that appeal, and they dig a hole in the red clay under a low wall beside a Barbary fig-tree.
'Ah! poor little soldier, who breathe your last, calling on your mother; you who, with your glazing eyes, saw the vision of your home; you who are laid there, at twenty-three years of age, to be devoured by the worms of that foreign soil on which you have suffered so much, and where you have met your death alone, forsaken, without a friend to soothe your last struggle, without a hand to close your eyelids, except the brutal hand of the hospital servant, which shut on your mouth like a muzzle when your desperate cries disturbed his sleep. Ah, I know why your sickness was mortal; I know it much better than the surgeon whose steel dissected your emaciated body; and I pity you, poor victim of the State, with all my heart and soul as I pity your mother who waits for you, counting the days of your absence, and who will only receive in her solitude the dry official notice of your death!
'Ah, no! I will not pity you, young dead soldier, nor your mother who mourns your loss! I will not pity you, sons, who are killed by the drinkers of blood, mothers who conceive what they send to the shambles. Mad women who endure the pangs of childbirth only to give up the fruit of their womb to the Minotaur which devours them! Know you not that the she-wolves let themselves be slain sooner than lose their offspring; that there are beasts which die of grief when their cubs are borne away from them? Do you not understand that it would be better to tear your new-born creatures limb from limb than to bring them up for one-and-twenty years, only to throw them into the hands of those who want their flesh to feed the cannon?... And you would ask our pity when, in some dark hour, the end comes, and the bones of your children are gnawed by hyænas and whitened by the sun in some forgotten corner of the earth?'