The first night he was placed there,
this arm hung outside the heap of dead, and the yellow hand, curled
up on a lump of earth, touched passers-by in the face; so they
pinned the arm to the greatcoat.
A pestilential vapor begins to hover about the remains of these
beings with whom we lived so intimately and suffered so long.
When we see them we say, "They are dead, all four"; but they are too
far disfigured for us to say truly, "It is they," and one must turn
away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left
among us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away.
Men of other companies or regiments, strangers who come this way by
day--by night one leans unconsciously on everything within reach of
the hand, dead or alive-give a start when faced by these corpses
flattened one on the other in the open trench. Sometimes they are
angry--"What are they thinking about to leave those stiffs
there?"--"It's shameful." Then they add, "It's true they can't be
taken away from there." And they were only buried in the night.
Morning has come. Opposite us we see the other slope of the ravine,
Hill 119, an eminence scraped, stripped, and scratched, veined with
shaken trenches and lined with parallel cuttings that vividly reveal
the clay and the chalky soil. Nothing is stirring there; and our
shells that burst in places with wide spouts of foam like huge
billows seem to deliver their resounding blows upon a great
breakwater, ruined and abandoned.
Pages:
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291