Heavy night is implanted everywhere around us.  My hands are bathed in black blood.  On my neck and cheeks, rain, which is also black, bleeds.

The funeral procession of silver-fringed clouds goes by once more, and again a ray of moonlight besilvers the swamp that has sunk us soldiers; it lays winding-sheets on the prone.

All at once a swelling lamentation comes to life, one knows not where, and glides over the plain:—­

“Help!  Help!”

“Now then! They’re not coming to look for us!  What about it?”

And I see a stirring and movement, very gentle, as at the bottom of the sea.

Amid the glut of noises, upon that still tepid and unsubmissive expanse where cold death sits brooding, that sharp profile has fallen back.  The cloak is quivering.  The great and sumptuous bird of prey is in the act of taking wing.

The horse has not stopped bleeding.  Its blood falls on me drop by drop with the regularity of a clock,—­as though all the blood that is filtering through the strata of the field and all the punishment of the wounded came to a head in him and through him.  Ah, it seems that truth goes farther in all directions than one thought!  We bend over the wrong that animals suffer, for them we wholly understand.

Men, men!  Everywhere the plain has a mangled outline.  Below that horizon, sometimes blue-black and sometimes red-black, the plain is monumental!

CHAPTER XV

AN APPARITION

I have not changed my place.  I open my eyes.  Have I been sleeping?  I do not know.  There is tranquil light now.  It is evening or morning.  My arms alone can tremble.  I am enrooted like a distorted bush.  My wound?  It is that which glues me to the ground.

I succeed in raising my face, and the wet waves of space assail my eyes.  Patiently I pick out of the earthy pallor which blends all things some foggy shoulders, some cloudy angles of elbows, some hand-like lacerations.  I discern in the still circle which encloses me—­faces lying on the ground and dirty as feet, faces held out to the rain like vases, and holding stagnant tears.

Quite near, one face is looking sadly at me, as it lolls to one side.  It is coming out of the bottom of the heap, as a wild animal might.  Its hair falls back like nails.  The nose is a triangular hole and a little of the whiteness of human marble dots it.  There are no lips left, and the two rows of teeth show up like lettering.  The cheeks are sprinkled with moldy traces of beard.  This body is only mud and stones.  This face, in front of my own, is only a consummate mirror.

Water-blackened overcoats cover and clothe the whole earth around me.

I gaze, and gaze——­

I am frozen by a mass which supports me.  My elbow sinks into it.  It is the horse’s belly; its rigid leg obliquely bars the narrow circle from which my eyes cannot escape.  Ah, it is dead!  It seems to me that my breast is empty, yet still there is an echo in my heart.  What I am looking for is life.