These lamentable lanes are staked out with corpses. At uneven
intervals their walls are broken into by quite recent gaps,
extending to their full depth, by funnelholes of fresh earth which
trespass upon the unwholesome land beyond, where earthy bodies are
squatting with their chins on their knees or leaning against the
wall as straight and silent as the rifles which wait beside them.
Some of these standing dead turn their blood-bespattered faces
towards the survivors; others exchange their looks with the sky's
emptiness.
Joseph halts to take breath. I say to him as to a child, "We're
nearly there, we're nearly there."
The sinister ramparts of this way of desolation contract still more.
They impel a feeling of suffocation, of a nightmare of falling which
oppresses and strangles: and in these depths where the walls seem to
be coming nearer and closing in, you are forced to halt, to wriggle
a path for yourself, to vex and disturb the dead, to be pushed about
by the endless disorder of the files that flow along these hinder
trenches, files made up of messengers, of the maimed, of men who
groan and who cry aloud, who hurry frantically, crimsoned by fever
or pallid and visibly shaken by pain.
* * * * * *
All this throng at last pulls up and gathers and groans at the
crossways where the burrows of the Refuge open out.
A doctor is trying with shouts and gesticulations to keep a little
space clear from the rising tide that beats upon the threshold of
the shelter, where he applies summary bandages in the open air; they
say he has not ceased to do it, nor his helpers either, all the
night and all the day, that he is accomplishing a superhuman task.
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