1In the fourteenth year of the century the kings of Europe went to war, all of them at once, and no one afterward could say clearly why. A prince was shot in a small city in the south. Within six weeks, men who had never heard of that city were marching in millions.
2There was a young man in Paris named Étienne Morel, the son of a baker, who was studying to be a teacher of the sciences. He had sat on the high benches of the old university and heard the thin woman in black speak about the rooms inside the atom. He had thought: I will spend my life on this.
3In August he was given a blue coat and a long rifle, and put on a train going north. Everyone said it would be over by the falling of the leaves.
4It was not over. By the first snow the armies had dug themselves into the ground, in two long ditches facing one another, from the mountains of the Swiss to the northern sea. Between the ditches lay a strip of torn earth, in some places no wider than a village street. No one could cross it and live. The dead lay out there where they fell, and no one could fetch them.
5Étienne learned to sleep standing in water. He learned the sound of each kind of shell. In November, in a fight at the wire before dawn, a figure rose up in front of him out of the fog, and he fired without thinking, as he had been drilled to do.
6When the light came he could see what he had shot. It was a boy with a soft fair beard, younger than himself, lying on his back with his spectacles still on. He lay eleven paces out. He lay there all that month, and Étienne looked at him every morning at stand-to, because there was nowhere else to look.
7Now hear what happened at the turning of the year.
8On the night before Christmas the guns fell quiet by themselves. The frost came down hard and clear, and the stars stood over both armies. Then a sentry called softly along the French ditch, "Come and look. They have gone mad over there."
9Along the top of the German ditch, small lights were coming out, one after another. They were candles. The Germans had set little fir trees on the edge of their trench, and tied candles to the branches, and lit them, where any rifleman could have shot them out.
10No one shot. A voice began to sing over there, one man alone, and then many. The French did not know the words, but they knew the tune. When it ended, a wine-grower in Étienne's company, a man with a fine voice, stood up on the firing step and sang back.
11In the morning a German climbed out of the ground with his hands held wide and empty and walked slowly into the middle. Any one of two hundred men could have killed him. He stood and waited.
12The lieutenant said, "Stay where you are." But the wine-grower was already over the top, and then others. Étienne went with them. His legs shook as he climbed out.
13They met in the middle, among the holes. For a while no one knew what to do with his hands. Then someone held out a pipe of tobacco, and someone gave a sausage for it, and it was done. Men who had been trying for months to kill each other stood about stamping their feet and showing pictures of their children.
14A German with a corporal's stripe came to Étienne. He had a few words of French. His name was Emil, he said, and before the war he had ground lenses in a glass-works. He gave Étienne a small flat cake with spices in it. Étienne gave him half a loaf of white bread. Emil smelled it and shut his eyes.
15Then Emil pointed, without a word, to the fair boy lying eleven paces from the French wire. He said a name. He made a sign: my friend.
16Étienne could not speak. He went with him. Together they lifted the boy, who was light now and stiff with frost, and carried him to a place where the Germans were digging. Emil took off the spectacles and folded them and put them inside his coat, for the mother. A French priest and a German pastor read over the pit, each in his own tongue, one after the other.
17Étienne did not tell Emil whose bullet it had been. He has asked himself since whether that silence was a mercy or a lie. He does not know. He only knows that he helped shovel the earth in, and that Emil gripped his arm afterward, and thanked him.
18By dusk the officers were calling the men back. The generals gave orders that it must never happen again, and it did not.
19That night Étienne had the watch at a ruined farm a little way behind the ditch. Half a wall stood, and a chimney. He had a fire of broken rafters in an iron pail, and he sat over it with his rifle across his knees, and thought about a pair of spectacles.
20Someone came along the road in the dark. He called the challenge. It was only an old woman, bent, in a man's long coat with a sack over her shoulder.
21She came to the fire without being asked and held out her hands to it. She did not say where she was coming from, or where she was going. She took four potatoes out of the sack and pushed them into the coals with a stick. He broke the other half of his loaf and gave her the larger piece, and opened a tin of meat with his knife.
22They ate without talking much. Her French was slow and odd, as if she had learned it far away. She looked a long time toward the east, where a few candles were still burning low along the edge of the German ditch.
23When the potatoes were eaten she wiped her fingers on her coat. Then she looked at him across the pail, and asked him one thing.
24"What have you left open?"
25He did not understand her. He thought her French had failed. "A door, grandmother? There are no doors here. Look." And he waved his hand at the half wall, and the sky.
26She said nothing more. She only looked at him, in no hurry, as someone looks who has asked a plain question and can wait for the answer.
27He thought of the boy in the pit, for whom he had closed everything. He thought of the classroom he had meant to stand in. He looked for one thing he had done since August that he could set on the other side of the scale, and he found nothing, and he was ashamed, and put more wood on the fire so as not to meet her eyes.
28He dozed toward morning, against the wall. When the cold woke him, the fire was low and she was gone. There was a fifth potato lying in the ash, still warm. The road was empty both ways.
29He told no one. But the question had got into him like a splinter. After the new year, when the shooting began again and he was put on the firing step, he found that he aimed a hand's breadth high. He never knew whether any man lived because of it. He hoped that a lens-grinder did.
30Now learn how the war went on, for it found new teachers.
31In the German lands there was a learned man named Fritz Haber. Some years before, he had done a thing that ranks among the great Openings of that age: he had found how to draw the makings of bread out of the plain air, so that worn-out fields could bear again. In later days, half the people on the earth would eat by his art.
32When the war came, the same man went to his generals and told them he could break the line for them. There was a heavy green gas that the dye-works made by the ton. Let it out when the wind was right, and it would roll along the ground and down into the enemy's ditches.
33His own wife was a chemist. She begged him to stop. She called it a twisting of everything their science was for. He did not stop.
34In April, Étienne's company was sent north, to the line in front of the old cloth-town of Ypres. On an evening of soft weather, with the wind blowing gently from the German side, he saw a strange thing: a low cloud, yellow-green, rising all along the enemy's ditch and creeping toward him over the grass. It was the height of a man. The young leaves on the hedges turned pale where it passed.
35Then it came down into the trench.
36The telling of that will be short. It burned the eyes and then the chest. Men clawed at their collars. Those who lay down to get under it died, for it was heaviest at the bottom. Those who ran took it deeper with every breath. A line that had held through a winter of shelling was empty in a quarter of an hour.
37Étienne ran. He is not proud of it; everyone ran who could. But at the turn of the trench he fell over the wine-grower with the fine voice, who was on his hands and knees, making a sound like a saw. He got the man's arm across his neck. He wet a scarf in a puddle and tied it over the man's face, and one over his own, and dragged him up the bank and back across the fields, toward the higher ground, with the shells coming down again behind them.
38He had the wine-grower nearly to the road when something struck him in the side like a thrown brick. He looked down and was surprised to see his coat turning dark.
39He woke on straw in a barn that had been made into a hospital, in the corner of Flanders that was still free. A surgeon stood over him, grey with tiredness, saying to another, "It is iron, and it has gone in deep, toward the great vessels. I cannot cut for it blind. If I go looking, I will kill him. If I leave it, it will."
40"Then we look first," said a woman's voice. "Bring him to the car."
41They carried him out to a grey motor-van with a red cross on its side. Inside there was a table, and a glass bulb on an arm, and wires running to the engine, which was left running to make the current. A girl of perhaps seventeen was setting the plates.
42The woman bent over him to place the bulb. She was thin, in a dusty black coat with a white band on the arm, and her fingertips were scarred. He had seen her before. He had seen her from the high benches, gripping the edge of a long table.
43"Madame," he said. "I was at your lessons."
44"Then you know to lie still," she said. And there came a hum, and a smell like the air after a storm.
45In a few minutes the girl held the plate up to the lamp, wet. There were his own ribs, pale as peeled sticks. And among them was a hard black shape the size of an almond, lying a finger's breadth from the root of the heart.
46"There," said the woman to the surgeon. "Go in from below, between these two. You will miss the vessel by this much." She showed him with her thumb and finger. And he did, and Étienne lived.
47He learned the rest while he lay mending. When the war began, she had seen that the wounded were dying under the knife because the surgeons could not see, and that the rays which see through flesh were shut up in a few city hospitals, far from the guns.
48So she had begged motor-cars from rich ladies, and fitted them out herself, and learned to drive them and to change their wheels in the mud. The girl was her daughter Irène. The soldiers called the vans the little Curies. Before the war ended, more than a million wounded men had been seen through, and the iron found.
49The unseen rays, that had burned her fingers in the shed, were opening men up without a knife.
50And see what Étienne saw, lying there. One science had made the green cloud, and one science had made the grey van. They came out of the same books. The makings of bread and the makings of the cloud came out of the same man. The fire does not choose. It never has. The choosing is in the hand that carries it.
51As for Haber, his wife went out into their garden on a night in May, some days after the cloud, with his army pistol. Their young son found her. Haber left for the eastern front the next morning to let out the gas there.
52Étienne lost a part of one lung. The army had no more use for him. When he could stand, he went to the woman in black and asked to be taught the work of the vans, and for the rest of the war he carried plates and ran the bulb, in barns and cellars from Flanders to Verdun. Afterward he became a teacher, as he had meant to, in a town by the Loire.
53He kept two things all his life in the drawer of his desk. One was a splinter of iron the size of an almond. The other was a potato, dried hard as a stone, which he would not explain to anyone.
54The war lasted four years. Ten million soldiers died in it, and no one has counted the rest. Each of them had been somebody's whole future. When it ended, most of the kings were gone, and the people of Europe looked at one another across the long ditch and could not remember what they had been promised.
55But some remembered a night when the candles were lit along the edge, and a man had walked out with his hands open, and for one day the strip of earth between the lines had been only a field.