I peer through the loophole.
Our line runs along the top of the ravine, and the land slopes
downward in front of me, plunging into an abyss of darkness where
one can see nothing. One's sight ends always by picking out the
regular lines of the stakes of our wire entanglements, planted on
the shore of the waves of night, and here and there the circular
funnel-like wounds of shells, little, larger, or enormous, and some
of the nearest occupied by mysterious lumber. The wind blows in my
face, and nothing else is stirring save the vast moisture that drain
from it. It is cold enough to set one shivering in perpetual motion.
I look upwards, this way and that; everything is borne down by
dreadful gloom. I might be derelict and alone in the middle of a
world destroyed by a cataclysm.
There is a swift illumination up above--a rocket. The scene in which
I am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The
crest of our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see,
stuck to the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars,
the shadows of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them
by a few spots of light. The trench is shored with sandbags. It is
widened everywhere, and in many places ripped up by landslides. The
sandbags, piled up and dislodged, appear in the starlike light of
the rocket like the great dismantled stones of ancient ruined
buildings. I look through the loophole, and discern in the misty and
pallid atmosphere expanded by the meteor the rows of stakes and even
the thin lines of barbed wire which cross and recross between the
posts.
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