"What a question!" the commandant of the trench exclaimed, laughing at
his audience. "Whether the Italians had heavy losses, too? Do you think
we let them pepper us like rabbits? You can easily calculate what those
fellows lost in their eleven attacks if we've melted down to thirty men
without crawling out of our trench. Just let them go on like that a few
weeks longer and they'll be at the end of their human material."
Captain Marschner had not wanted to listen. He stood bending over a map,
but at the phrase, "human material," he started violently. It sounded
like a taunt directed at his own thoughts, as if the two men had seen
into him and had agreed with each other to give him a good lesson and
show him how alone he was.
"Human material!"
In a trench, filled with the stench of dead bodies, shaken by the impact
of the shells, stood two men, each himself a stake in the game, and
while the dice were still being tossed for their very bones, they talked
of--human material! They uttered those ruthless, shameful words without
a shadow of indignation, as though it were natural for their living
bodies to be no more than a gambler's chips in the hands of men who
arrogated to themselves the right to play the game of gods. Without
hesitating they laid their one, irrevocable life at the feet of a power
that could not prove whether it had known how to place the stakes
rightly except by their dead bodies.
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