At this moment an infernal whistle falls on us and we bend like
bushes. The shell bursts in the air in front of us, deafening and
blinding, and buries us under a horribly sibilant mountain of dark
smoke. A climbing soldier has churned the air with his arms and
disappeared, hurled into some hole. Shouts have gone up and fallen
again like rubbish. While we are looking, through the great black
veil that the wind tears from the ground and dismisses into the sky,
at the bearers who are putting down a stretcher, running to the
place of the explosion and picking up something inert--I recall the
unforgettable scene when my brother-in-arms, Poterloo, whose heart
was so full of hope, vanished with his arms outstretched in the
flame of a shell.
We arrive at last on the summit, which is marked as with a signal by
a wounded and frightful man. He is upright in the wind, shaken but
upright, enrooted there. In his uplifted and wind-tossed cape we see
a yelling and convulsive face. We pass by him, and he is like a sort
of screaming tree.
* * * * * *
We have arrived at our old first line, the one from which we set off
for the attack. We sit down on a firing-step with our backs to the
holes cut for our exodus at the last minute by the sappers. Euterpe,
the cyclist, passes and gives us good-day. Then he turns in his
tracks and draws from the cuff of his coat-sleeve an envelope, whose
protruding edge had conferred a white stripe on him.
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