Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Naples
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between the two, a mere child’s play compared
with what I saw later. I saw Him at Naples
killing more than a thousand people a day before
my very eyes. I saw Him at Messina burying
over one hundred thousand men, women and
children under the falling houses in a single
minute. Later on I saw Him at Verdun, His
arms red with blood to the elbows, slaughtering
four hundred thousand men, and mowing down
the flower of a whole army on the plains of
Flanders and of the Somme. It is only since I
have seen Him operating on a large scale that I
have begun to understand something of the
tactics of the warfare. It is a fascinating study,
full of mystery and contradictions. It all seems
at first a bewildering chaos, a blind meaningless
slaughter full of confusion and blunders. At one
moment Life, brandishing a new weapon in its
hand, advances victoriously, only to retire the
next moment, defeated by triumphant Death.
It is not so. The battle is regulated in its
minutest details by an immutable law of
equilibrium between Life and Death. Wherever this
equilibrium is upset by some accidental cause,
be it pestilence, earthquake or war, vigilant
Nature sets to work at once to readjust the
balance, to call forth new beings to take the
place of the fallen. Compelled by the irresistible
force of a Natural Law men and women fall in
each other’s arms, blindfolded by lust, unaware
that it is Death who presides over their mating,
his aphrodisiac in one hand, his narcotic in the
other. Death, the giver of Life, the slayer of
Life, the beginning and the end.
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