The wound that he
had under his armor of filth was staining the ground, and when he
had spoken, his wide-open eyes looked down at all the blood he had
given for the healing of the world.
* * * * * *
The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling
more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day
is full of night. It is as if new enemy shapes of men and groups of
men are rising unceasingly on the crest of the mountain-chain of
clouds, round about the barbaric outlines of crosses, eagles,
churches, royal and military palaces and temples. They seem to
multiply there, shutting out the stars that are fewer than mankind;
it seems even as if these apparitions are moving in all directions
in the excavated ground, here, there, among the real beings who are
thrown there at random, half buried in the earth like grains of
corn.
My still living companions have at last got up. Standing with
difficulty on the foundered soil, enclosed in their bemired garb,
laid out in strange upright coffins of mud, raising their huge
simplicity out of the earth's depths--a profoundity like that of
ignorance--they move and cry out, with their gaze, their arms and
their fists extended towards the sky whence fall daylight and storm.
They are struggling against victorious specters, like the Cyranos
and Don Quixotes that they still are.
One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the
plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old
trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and
purifies, in the center of a polar desert whose horizons fume.
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