His mind pictured the soldiers who would place their defiant bodies before the spear of the yelling battle fiend, and as he saw their dripping corpses on an imagined field, he said that he was their murderer.
Again he thought that he wished he was dead.

He believed that he envied a corpse.

Thinking of the slain, he achieved a great contempt for some of them, as if they were guilty for thus becoming lifeless.
They might have been killed by lucky chances, he said, before they had had opportunities to flee or before they had been really tested.

Yet they would receive laurels from tradition.

He cried out bitterly that their crowns were stolen and their robes of glorious memories were shams.