Hardly anything is left visible in the night, but at the exit
from the hole we see a disorder of beams which flounder in the
widened trench--some demolished dugout.
Just at this moment, a searchlight's unearthly arm that was swinging
through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of
uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with
dead soldiers. Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs
on its back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with
clotted drops, covers the cheek. Another body so clasps a post in
its arms that it has only half fallen. Another, lying in the form of
a circle, has been stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are
laid bare. Another, outstretched on the edge of the heap, has thrown
his hand across our path; and in this place where there no traffic
except by night--for the trench is blocked just there by the
earth-fall and inaccessible by day--every one treads on that hand.
By the searchlight's shaft I saw it clearly, fleshless and worn, a
sort of withered fin.
The rain is raging and the sound of its streaming dominates
everything--a horror of desolation. We feel the water on our flesh
as if the deluge had washed our clothes away.
We enter the open trench, and the embrace of night and storm resumes
the sole possession of this confusion of corpses, stranded and
cramped on a square of earth as on a raft.
The wind freezes the drops of sweat on our foreheads.
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