The distant sky is resonant, and each dull shot comes and pushes my shoulder.  Nearer, some shells are thundering heavily.  Though I cannot see them, I see the tawny reflection that their flame spreads abroad, and the sudden darkness as well that is hurled by their clouds of excretion.  Other shadows go and come on the ground about me; and then I hear in the air the plunge of beating wings, and cries so fierce that I feel them ransack my head.

* * * * * *

Death is not yet dead everywhere.  Some points and surfaces still resist and budge and cry out, doubtless because it is dawn; and once the wind swept away a muffled bugle-call.  There are some who still burn with the invisible fire of fever, in spite of the frozen periods they have crossed.  But the cold is working into them.  The immobility of lifeless things is passing into them, and the wind empties itself as it goes by.

Voices are worn away; looks are soldered to their eyes.  Wounds are staunched; they have finished.  Only the earth and the stones bleed.  And just then I saw, under the trickling morning, some half-open but still tepid dead that steamed, as if they were the blackening rubbish-heap of a village.  I watch that hovering dead breath of the dead.  The crows are eddying round the naked flesh with their flapping banners and their war-cries.  I see one which has found some shining rubies on the black vein-stone of a foot; and one which noisily draws near to a mouth, as if called by it.  Sometimes a dead man makes a movement, so that he will fall lower down.  But they will have no more burial than if they were the last men of all.

* * * * * *

There is one upright presence which I catch a glimpse of, so near, so near; and I want to see it.  In making the effort with my elbow on the horse’s ballooned body I succeed in altering the direction of my head, and of the corridor of my gaze.  Then all at once I discover a quite new population of bronze men in rotten clothes; and especially, erect on bended knees, a gray overcoat, lacquered with blood and pierced by a great hole, round which is collected a bunch of heavy crimson flowers.  Slowly I lift the burden of my eyes to explore that hole.  Amid the shattered flesh, with its changing colors and a smell so strong that it puts a loathsome taste in my mouth, at the bottom of the cage where some crossed bones are black and rusted as iron bars, I can see something, something isolated, dark and round.  I see that it is a heart.

Placed there, too—­I do not know how, for I cannot see the body’s full height—­the arm, and the hand.  The hand has only three fingers—­a fork——­ Ah, I recognize that heart!  It is his whom I killed.  Prostrate in the mud before him, because of my defeat and my resemblance, I cried out to the man’s profundity, to the superhuman man.  Then my eyes fell; and I saw worms moving on the edges of that infinite wound.  I was quite close to their stirring.  They are whitish worms, and their tails are pointed like stings; they curve and flatten out, sometimes in the shape of an “i,” and sometimes of a “u.”  The perfection of immobility is left behind.  The human material is crumbled into the earth for another end.