MEET ME ON THE BARRICADES

Hepaused in admiration of his thoughts and con- tinued, pacing, thinking.

——It’s a game to them. Chess, for example, with millions of lives as pawns and pieces. Slogan against slogan: collective security, peace is indivisible, de- mocracy against fascism. Or, on the other hand: neutrality, war is inevitable, socialism against capi- talism. Deals, maneuvers, and propaganda. Then the move is made with living bodies. . . .

Recalling a dispatch from the Far East in the morning’s paper:

—Nearly a quarter of a million Chinese died in the fighting around Shanghai. Bodies rotting in the streets, unburied. Somebody made a slight tactical error. Wrong analysis, wrong policy, wrong slogan, wrong move. So a dead coolie lies unburied in Bub- bling Well Road, dead between the shafts of his rickshaw. Died in hamess, good man. Didn’t even have time to take up a rifle in defense of his demo- cratic right to act as a human draught animal. Or Japanese peasants, taken from their farms. More slo- gans: the need for natural resources, inevitable ex- pansion. . . . A Japanese kid with a piece of shrapnel in his guts, grinning in death.

—No magic formula, Ascaso said. Then God help us all!

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