But there,
worse than a body, a solitary arm protrudes, bare and white as a
stone, from a hole which dimly shows on the other side of the water.
The man has been buried in his dug-out and has had only the time to
thrust out his arm.
Quite near, we notice that some mounds of earth aligned along the
ruined ramparts of this deep-drowned ditch are human. Are they
dead--or asleep? We do not know; in any case, they rest.
Are they German or French? We do not know. One of them has opened
his eyes, and looks at us with swaying head. We say to him,
"French?"--and then, "Deutsch?" He makes no reply, but shuts his
eyes again and relapses into oblivion. We never knew what he was.
We cannot decide the identity of these beings, either by their
clothes, thickly covered with filth, or by their head-dress, for
they are bareheaded or swathed in woolens under their liquid and
offensive cowls; or by their weapons, for they either have no rifles
or their hands rest lightly on something they have dragged along, a
shapeless and sticky mass, like to a sort of fish.
All these men of corpse-like faces who are before us and behind us,
at the limit of their strength, void of speech as of will, all these
earth-charged men who you would say were carrying their own
winding-sheets, are as much alike as if they were naked. Out of the
horror of the night apparitions are issuing from this side and that
who are clad in exactly the same uniform of misery and mud.
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