Above him the tornado was still raging.  A peal like thunder boomed above his head, and then came the crash of a landslide.  Another projectile must have fallen upon the building.  He heard shrieks of agony, yells and precipitous steps on the floor above him.  Perhaps the shell, in its blind fury, had blown to pieces many of the dying in the salons.

Fearing to remain buried in his retreat, he bounded up the cellar stairs two steps at a time.  As he scudded across the first floor, he saw the sky through the shattered roofs.  Along the edges were hanging sections of wood, fragments of swinging tile and furniture stopped halfway in its flight.  Crossing the hall, he had to clamber over much rubbish.  He stumbled over broken and twisted iron, parts of beds rained from the upper rooms into the mountain of debris in which he saw convulsed limbs and heard anguished voices that he could not understand.

He leaped as he ran, feeling the same longing for light and free air as those who rush from the hold to the deck of a shipwreck.  While sheltered in the darkness more time had elapsed than he had supposed.  The sun was now very high.  He saw in the garden more corpses in tragic and grotesque postures.  The wounded were doubled over with pain or lying on the ground or propping themselves against the trees in painful silence.  Some had opened their knapsacks and drawn out their sanitary kits and were trying to care for their cuts.  The infantry was now firing incessantly.  The number of riflemen had increased.  New bands of soldiers were entering the park—­some with a sergeant at their head, others followed by an officer carrying a revolver at his breast as though guiding his men with it.  This must be the infantry expelled from their position near the river which had come to reinforce the second line of defense.  The mitrailleuses were adding their tac-tac to the cracks of the fusileers.

The hum of the invisible swarms was buzzing incessantly.  Thousands of sticky horse-flies were droning around Desnoyers without his even seeing them.  The bark of the trees was being stripped by unseen hands; the leaves were falling in torrents; the boughs were shaken by opposing forces, the stones on the ground were being crushed by a mysterious foot.  All inanimate objects seemed to have acquired a fantastic life.  The zinc spoons of the soldiers, the metallic parts of their outfit, the pails of the artillery were all clanking as though in an imperceptible hailstorm.  He saw a cannon lying on its side with the wheels broken and turned over among many men who appeared asleep; he saw soldiers who stretched themselves out without a contraction, without a sound, as though overcome by sudden drowsiness.  Others were howling and dragging themselves forward in a sitting position.

The old man felt an extreme sensation of heat.  The pungent perfume of explosive drugs brought the tears to his eyes and clawed at his throat.  At the same time he was chilly and felt his forehead freezing in a glacial sweat.