All the way along, as far as an
earthwork barricade that blocks the way, German corpses are
entangled and knotted as in a torrent of the damned, some of them
emerging from muddy caves in the middle of a bewildering
conglomerate of beams, ropes, creepers of iron, trench-rollers,
hurdles, and bullet-screens. At the barrier itself, one corpse
stands upright, fixed in the other dead, while another, planted in
the same spot, stands obliquely in the dismal place, the whole
arrangement looking like part of a big wheel embedded in the mud, or
the shattered sail of a windmill. And over all this, this
catastrophe of flesh and filthiness, religious images are broadcast,
post-cards, pious pamphlets, leaflets on which prayers are written
in Gothic lettering--they have scattered themselves in waves from
gutted clothing. The paper words seem to bedeck with blossom these
shores of pestilence, this Valley of Death, with their countless
pallors of barren lies.
I seek a solid footway to guide Joseph in--his wound is paralyzing
him by degrees, and he feels it extending throughout his body. While
I support him, and he is looking at nothing, I look upon the ghastly
upheaval through which we are escaping.
A German sergeant is seated, here where we tread, supported by the
riven timbers that once formed the shelter of a sentry. There is a
little hole under his eye; the thrust of a bayonet has nailed him to
the planks through his face. In front of him, also sitting, with his
elbows on his knees and his fists on his chin, there is a man who
has all the top of his skull taken off like a boiled egg.
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