"Why don't we go on to the next?" a second asks me in fury. "Now
we're here, we'd be there in a few jumps!'
"I, too, I want to go on."--"Me, too. Ah, the hogs!" They shake
themselves like banners. They carry the luck of their survival as it
were glory; they are implacable, uncontrolled, intoxicated with
themselves.
We wait and stamp about in the captured work, this strange
demolished way that winds along the plain and goes from the unknown
to the unknown.
Advance to the right!
We begin to flow again in one direction. No doubt it is a movement
planned up there, back yonder, by the chiefs. We trample soft bodies
underfoot, some of which are moving and slowly altering their
position; rivulets and cries come from them. Like posts and heaps of
rubbish, corpses are piled anyhow on the wounded, and press them
down, suffocate them, strangle them. So that I can get by, I must
push at a slaughtered trunk of which the neck is a spring of
gurgling blood.
In the cataclysm of earth and of massive wreckage blown up and blown
out, above the hordes of wounded and dead that stir together,
athwart the moving forest of smoke implanted in the trench and in
all its environs, one no longer sees any face but what is inflamed,
blood-red with sweat, eyes flashing. Some groups seem to be dancing
as they brandish their knives. They are elated, immensely confident,
ferocious.
The battle dies down imperceptibly. A soldier says, "Well, what's to
be done now?" ft flares up again suddenly at one point.
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