The eyes are two white
holes; the mouth is a black hole. The mask's yellow and puffed-up
skin appears soft and creased, like dough gone cold.
They are the men who were watching there, and could not extricate
themselves from the mud. All their efforts to escape over the sticky
escarpment of the trench that was slowly and fatally filling with
water only dragged them still more into the depth. They died
clinging to the yielding support of the earth.
There, our first lines are; and there, the first German lines,
equally silent and flooded. On our way to these flaccid ruins we
pass through the middle of what yesterday was the zone of terror,
the awful space on whose threshold the fierce rush of our last
attack was forced to stop, the No Man's Land which bullets and
shells had not ceased to furrow for a year and a half, where their
crossed fire during these latter days had furiously swept the ground
from one horizon to the other.
Now, it is a field of rest. The ground is everywhere dotted with
beings who sleep or who are on the way to die, slowly moving,
lifting an arm, lifting the head.
The enemy trench is completing the process of foundering into
itself, among great marshy undulations and funnel-holes, shaggy with
mud: it forms among them a line of pools and wells. Here and there
we can see the still overhanging banks begin to move, crumble, and
fail down. In one place we can lean against it.
In this bewildering circle of filth there are no bodies.
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