Like an overburdened steam-crane his left hand struggled toward his head, and when he at last succeeded in pushing it under his neck, he felt with a shudder that his skull offered no resistance and his hand slid into a warm, soft mush, and his hair, pasty with coagulated blood, stuck to his fingers like warm, moist felt.
"Dying!" went through him with a chill. To die there—all alone. And Weixler? He had to find out what had happened to—happened to——
With a superhuman effort he propped his head up on his left hand high enough to have a view of a few paces along the trench. Now he saw Weixler, with his back turned, leaning on his right side against the trench wall, standing there crookedly, his left hand pressed against his body, his shoulders hunched as if he had a cramp. The captain raised himself a little higher and saw the ground and a broad, dark shadow that Weixler cast. Blood? He was bleeding? Or what? Surely that was blood. It couldn't be anything but blood. And yet it stretched out so peculiarly and drew itself like a thin, red thread up to Weixler, up to where his hand pressed his body as though he wanted to pull up the roots that bound him to the earth.
The captain had to see! He pulled his head farther out from under the mound—and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The wretched man was dragging his entrails behind him!
"Weixler!" burst from him in a shudder of compassion.
The man turned slowly, looked down at Marschner questioningly, pale, sad, with frightened eyes. He stood like that only the fraction of a second, then he lost his balance, reeled, and fell down, and was lost from the captain's circle of vision. Their glances scarcely had time to cross, the pallid face had merely flitted by. And yet it stood there, remained fixed in the air, with a mild, soft, plaintive expression about the narrow lips, an unforgettable air of gentle anxious resignation.
"He is suffering!" flashed through Marschner. "He is suffering!"—it exulted him. And a glow suffused his pallor. His fingers, sticky with blood, seemed to caress the air, until his head sank backward, and his eyes broke.
The first soldiers who penetrated the towering mound of earth to where he lay found him dead. But in spite of his ghastly wound, a contented, almost happy smile hovered about his lips.