midnight
Am I to forget the moment in the smoky railway station when I leaned out of the car window and saw my boy ashen white , with compressed lips , standing beside his mother , and I made a poor show of cheerfulness and talked of seeing them soon again , while my eyes greedily searched the features of my wife and child , and my soul drank in the picture of them like parched lips after a many days ' march drinking in the water so madly longed for ? Am I to forget the choking and the bitterness in my mouth when the train began to move and the distance swallowed up my child , my wife , my world ? And the whole ride to death , when I was the only military traveler in a car full of happy family men off for a summer Sunday in the country -- am I to tear it out of my memory like so much cumbersome waste paper ? Am I to forget how I felt when it grew quieter at each station , as though life were crumbling away , bit by bit , until at midnight only one or two sleepy soldiers remained in my coach and an ashen young face drawn with sorrow hovered about the flickering lamplight ? Must one actually be sick if it is like an incurable wound always to feel that leave-taking of home and warmth , that riding away with hatred and danger awaiting one at the end of the trip ? Is there anything harder to understand -- when have men done anything madder -- than this : to race through the night at sixty miles an hour , to run away from all love , all security , to leave the train and take another train because it is the only one that goes to where invisible machines belch red-hot pieces , of iron and Death casts out a finely meshed net of steel and lead to capture men ? Who will obliterate from my soul the picture of that small dirty junction , the shivering , sleepy soldiers without any intoxication or music in their blood , looking wistfully after the civilian 's train and its brightly lighted windows as it disappeared behind the trees with a jolly blow of its whistle ?