He imagined that these words possessed some occult power which must keep the two horrible women away from him.
So he continued to repeat them all night long.
Between two and three o'clock Florian Audet opened his eyes and turned his head to look round. The wounded German's voice had roused him from sleep—or from unconsciousness—and he lay there vaguely wondering what that continually repeated cry might mean.
"Die Flundern werden sich wundern...." The words sank into his brain and remained there. Perhaps, he mused, it was some kind of national war-cry, a shout of victory or defiance ... "Death or liberty!..." or "In the name of the Kaiser," or something like that.
From where he was he could see the outstretched figure lying to the left of him, the limp legs, the helpless, upturned feet in their thick muddy boots; and he heard the sound of the rattling breath still repeating brokenly, "Die Flundern werden sich wundern...."
An overwhelming sense of pity came over him; pity for the broken figure beside him, pity for himself, pity for the world. With an immense effort, for he felt as if every bone were broken, he turned on his side and, struggling slowly along the ground, dragged himself towards the dying man. When he reached him and could touch him with his outstretched hand he rested awhile; then he fumbled for his brandy-flask, found it, unscrewed it and held it near the man's face.
"Tiens! bois," he said. But the German did not move to take it; and soon the rattling breath stopped.
Florian wriggled a little closer, slipped his right arm under the man's head and raised it. Then by the grey April starlight he saw something bubble and gush over the man's face from a wound in his forehead. The German opened his eyes. What were those fiendish women doing to him now? Pouring warm wine over his head.... Through the tepid scarlet veil his wild eyes blinked up at Florian in childish terror and bewilderment. A wave of sickening faintness overcame Florian; his arm slackened, and his enemy's ghastly crimson face fell back upon it as Florian himself sank beside him in a swoon.
There they lay all through the night, side by side, like brothers, the living and the dead; the German soldier with his head on the Belgian officer's arm. And thus two German Red Cross men found them in the chilly dawn as they slid down the crater-side, carrying a folded stretcher between them. They were very young, the two Red Cross men; they had not finished studying philosophy in the Bonn University when the war had broken out, and they had left Kant and Hebel for a quick course of surgery. The youngest one, who had very fair hair, wrote foolish Latin poems, said to be after the style of Lucretius.
They dropped the stretcher and stood silently looking down at those two motionless figures in their fraternal embrace, whose attitude told their tale. Florian's hand, holding the open brandy-flask, lay on the dead German's breast; the ghastly dead face of their comrade was pillowed easily on the enemy's encircling arm.