The death-rattle has got
one of them. It is like a sobbing song that rises from him. The
others then half straighten themselves, kneeling round him, and roll
great eyes in their muck-mottled faces. We get up and watch the
scene. But the rattle dies out, and the blackened throat which alone
in all the big body pulsed like a little bird, is still.
"Er ist todt!" (He's dead) says one of the men, beginning to cry.
The others settle themselves again to sleep. The weeper goes to
sleep as he weeps.
Other soldiers have come, stumbling, gripped in sudden halts like
tipsy men, or gliding along like worms, to take sanctuary here; and
we sleep all jumbled together in the common grave.
* * * * * *
Waking, Paradis and I look at each other, and remember. We return to
life and daylight as in a nightmare. In front of us the calamitous
plain is resurrected, where hummocks vaguely appear from their
immersion, the steel-like plain that is rusty in places and shines
with lines and pools of water, while bodies are strewn here and
there in the vastness like foul rubbish, prone bodies that breathe
or rot.
Paradis says to me, "That's war."
"Yes, that's it," he repeats in a far-away voice, "that's war. It's
not anything else."
He means--and I am with him in his meaning--"More than attacks that
are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like
banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting
strife, War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the
belly, mud and dung and infamous filth.
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