Under
the livid sky the sandbags are taking the same hue, and their
vaguely shining and rounded shapes are like the bowels and viscera
of giants, nakedly exposed upon the earth.
In the trench-wall behind me, in a hollowed recess, there is a heap
of horizontal things like logs. Tree-trunks? No, they are corpses.
* * * * * *
As the call of birds goes up from the furrowed ground, as the
shadowy fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each
blade of grass, I look towards the ravine. Below the quickening
field and its high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the
bristling of stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and
in front of the opposite slope a wall of night still stands.
Then I turn again and look upon these dead men whom the day is
gradually exhuming, revealing their stained and stiffened forms.
There are four of them. They are our comrades, Lamuse, Barque,
Biquet, and little Eudore. They rot there quite near us, blocking
one half of the wide, twisting, and muddy furrow that the living
must still defend.
They have been laid there as well as may be, supporting and crushing
each other. The topmost is wrapped in a tent-cloth. Handkerchiefs
had been placed on the faces of the others; but in brushing against
them in the dark without seeing them, or even in the daytime without
noticing them, the handkerchiefs have fallen, and we are living face
to face with these dead, heaped up there like a wood-pile.
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