Well, the war which lasted from February 12, 1944, to the autumn of 1953, was in all truthfulness and without exaggeration (on my honour!) the Greatest War. Do not let us rob those who lived through it of this one solitary and well-earned satisfaction. 198,000,000 men took part in the fighting, and all but thirteen of them fell. I could give you figures by which accountants and statisticians have attempted to illustrate these enormous losses—for instance, how many thousand kilometres the bodies would stretch if laid one beside the other, and for how many hours an express train would have to run if the bodies were put on the line in place of sleepers; or if the index fingers of all the fallen were cut off and put in sardine-tins, how many hundred goods trucks could be filled with such a load, and so on. But I have a poor memory for figures, and I don’t want to cheat you out of a single miserable statistical truck-load. So I repeat that it was the greatest war since the creation of the world, whether you take into consideration the loss of life or the extent of the theatre of war.

Once again the present chronicler has to excuse himself for not caring very much for descriptions of events on the grand scale. Perhaps he ought to relate how the war swung from the Rhine to the Euphrates, from Korea to Denmark, from Lugano to Haparanda, and so forth. Instead of this, he would far rather depict the arrival of the Bedouins in their white burnouses at Geneva, and how they came galloping in with the heads of their enemies stuck on their six-foot spears; or the love adventures of a French poilu in Thibet; the cavalcades of Russian Cossacks that crossed the Sahara; the nightly encounters of Macedonia comitadjis with Senegalese sharpshooters on the shores of the lakes of Finland. As you see, there is the greatest diversity of material. Bobinet’s victorious regiments flew, so to speak, in one dazzling swoop in the footprints of Alexander the Great across India to China; but meanwhile the Yellow invasion swept over Siberia and Russia into France and Spain, thus cutting off from their native land the Moslems who were operating in Sweden. The Russian regiments, retreating before the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Chinese, found themselves in North Africa, where Sergei Nikolayevich Zlocin established his Czardom. He was soon murdered, however, because his Bavarian generals conspired against his Prussian hetmans, and Sergei Fyodorovich Zlosin thereupon ascended the Imperial throne in Timbuctoo.