We struggle like drowning men
through the acrid darkness of a fallen fragment of night. One
stumbles against barriers of cowering clustered beings who bleed and
howl in the bottom. Hardly can one make out the trench walls,
straight up just here and made of white sandbags, which are
everywhere torn like paper. At one time the heavy adhesive reek
sways and lifts, and one sees again the swarming mob of the
attackers. Torn out of the dusty picture, the silhouette of a
hand-to-hand struggle is drawn in fog on the wall, it droops and
sinks to the bottom. I hear several shrill cries of "Kamarad!"
proceeding from a pale-faced and gray-clad group in the huge corner
made by a rending shell. Under the inky cloud the tempest of men
flows back, climbs towards the right, eddying, pitching and falling,
along the dark and ruined mole.
* * * * * *
And suddenly one feels that it is over. We see and hear and
understand that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has
not encountered an equal breaker. They have fallen back on our
approach. The battle has dissolved in front of us. The slender
curtain of defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are
caught like rats or killed. There is no more resistance, but a void,
a great void. We advance in crowds like a terrible array of
spectators.
And here the trench seems all lightning-struck. With its tumbled
white walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a
vanished river that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the
flat round hole of a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the
sloping banks and in the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of
corpses--a dead river that is filled again to overflowing by the new
tide and the breaking wave of our company.
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