Twenty yards
away in the plain, in the direction of a circle that the gray
embankment makes, a cluster of rifle-shots crackles and hurls its
scattered missiles around a hidden machine-gun, that spits
intermittently and seems to be in difficulties.
Under the shadowy wing of a sort of yellow and bluish nimbus I see
men encircling the flashing machine and closing in on it. Near to me
I make out the silhouette of Mesnil Joseph, who is steering straight
and with no effort of concealment for the spot whence the barking
explosions come in jerky sequence.
A flash shoots out from a corner of the trench between us two.
Joseph halts, sways, stoops, and drops on one knee. I run to him and
he watches me coming. "It's nothing--my thigh. I can crawl along by
myself." He seems to have become quiet, childish, docile; and sways
slowly towards the trench.
I have still in my eyes the exact spot whence rang the shot that hit
him, and I slip round there by the left, making a detour. No one
there. I only meet another of our squad on the same errand--Paradis.
We are bustled by men who are carrying on their shoulders pieces of
iron of all shapes. They block up the trench and separate us. "The
machine-gun's taken by the 7th," they shout, "it won't bark any
more. It was a mad devil--filthy beast! Filthy beast!"
"What's there to do now?"--"Nothing."
We stay there, jumbled together, and sit down. The living have
ceased to gasp for breath, the dying have rattled their last,
surrounded by smoke and lights and the din of the guns that rolls to
all the ends of the earth.
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