But in the hole where we are there is scarcely any
risk of being hit. At the first lull, some of the men who were also
waiting detach themselves and begin to go up; stretcher-bearers
redouble their huge efforts to carry a body and climb, making one
think of stubborn ants pushed back by successive grains of sand;
wounded men and liaison men move again.
"Let's go on," says Joseph, with sagging shoulders, as he measures
the hill with his eye--the last stage of his Gethsemane.
There are trees here; a row of excoriated willow trunks, some of
wide countenance, and others hollowed and yawning, like coffins on
end. The scene through which we are struggling is rent and
convulsed, with hills and chasms, and with such somber swellings as
if all the clouds of storm had rolled down here. Above the tortured
earth, this stampeded file of trunks stands forth against a striped
brown sky, milky in places and obscurely sparkling--a sky of agate.
Across the entry to Trench 97 a felled oak twists his great body,
and a corpse stops up the trench. Its head and legs are buried in
the ground. The dirty water that trickles in the trench has covered
it with a sandy glaze, and through the moist deposit the chest and
belly bulge forth, clad in a shirt. We stride over the frigid
remains, slimy and pale, that suggest the belly of a stranded
crocodile; and it is difficult to do so, by reason of the soft and
slippery ground. We have to plunge our hands up to the wrists in the
mud of the wall.
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