This corner at the
extremity of the gloom offers itself as a way of escape, an oasis
where one may stand upright, where one is lightly, angelically
touched by the light of heaven.
"There were some chaps there that were blown to bits when the shells
burst," said some one to me who was waiting there in the sickly ray
of entombed light. "You talk about a mess! Look, there's the padre
hooking down what was blown up."
The huge Red Cross sergeant, in a hunter's chestnut waistcoat which
gives him the chest of a gorilla, is detaching the pendent entrails
twisted among the beams of the shattered woodwork. For the purpose
he is using a rifle with fixed bayonet, since he could not find a
stick long enough; and the heavy giant, bald, bearded and asthmatic,
wields the weapon awkwardly. He has a mild face, meek and unhappy,
and while he tries to catch the remains of intestines in the
corners, he mutters a string of "Oh's!" like sighs. His eyes are
masked by blue glasses; his breathing is noisy. The top of his head
is of puny dimensions, and the huge thickness of his neck has a
conical shape. To see him thus pricking and unhanging from the air
strips of viscera and rags of flesh, you could take him for a
butcher at some fiendish task.
But I let myself fall in a corner with my eyes half closed, seeing
hardly anything of the spectacle that lies and palpitates and falls
around me. Indistinctly I gather some fragments of sentences--still
the horrible monotony of the story of wounds: "Nom de Dieu! In that
place I should think the bullets were touching each other.
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