But has he seen me?  I cannot say now.  He is stirred by fever as by the wind; he is choked with blood.  He writhes, and that shows me the beaten-down wings of his black cloak.

Close by, some of the wounded have cried out; and farther away one would say they are singing—­beyond the low stakes so twisted and shriveled that they look as if guillotined.

He does not know what he is saying.  He does not even know that he is speaking, that his thoughts are coming out.  The night is torn into rags by sudden bursts; it fills again at random with clusters of flashes; and his delirium enters into my head.  He murmurs that logic is a thing of terrible chains, and that all things cling together.  He utters sentences from which distinct words spring, like the scattered hasty gleams they include in hymns—­the Bible, history, majesty, folly.  Then he shouts:—­

“There is nothing in the world but the Empire’s glory!”

His cry shakes some of the motionless reefs.  And I, like an invincible echo, I cry:—­

“There is only the glory of France!”

I do not know if I did really cry out, and if our words did collide in the night’s horror.  His head is quite bare.  His slender neck and bird-like profile issue from a fur collar.  There are things like owls shining on his breast.  It seems to me as if silence is digging itself into the brains and lungs of the dark prisoners who imprison us, and that we are listening to it.

He rambles more loudly now, as if he bore a stifling secret; he calls up multitudes, and still more multitudes.  He is obsessed by multitudes—­“Men, men!” he says.  The soil is caressed by some sounds of sighs, terribly soft, by confidences which are interchanged without their wishing it.  Now and again, the sky collapses into light, and that flash of instantaneous sunshine changes the shape of the plain every time, according to its direction.  Then does the night take all back again athwart the rolling echoes.

“Men!  Men!”

“What about them, then?” says a sudden jeering voice which falls like a stone.

“Men must not awake,” the shining shadow goes on, in dull and hollow tones.

“Don’t worry!” says the ironical voice, and at that moment it terrifies me.

Several bodies arise on their fists into the darkness—­I see them by their heavy groans—­and look around them.

The shadow talks to himself and repeats his insane words:—­

“Men must not awake.”

The voice opposite me, capsizing in laughter and swollen with a rattle, says again:—­

“Don’t worry!”

Yonder, in the hemisphere of night, comets glide, blending their cries of engines and owls with their flaming entrails.  Will the sky ever recover the huge peace of the sun and the stainless blue?

A little order, a little lucidity are coming back into my mind.  Then I begin to think about myself.