Drowned trees writhed in the blurred light, culverts leaped out of the yellow flood like fountains, and dead walls in the burned and ravished villages seemed like rows of Roman tombs. We flew through the murdered town of Eppeghem, down vacant alleys lined with gaunt, disembowelled dwellings, beneath the shell of a church, beside stark walls lit for a breathless instant by the headlight of the motor then blotted into chaos. It was eerie and terrifying. A peculiar odour of decay, the odour of sour soil in early spring when the grip of the ice is relaxed and the buried abominations of winter steal up into the sun, rose from the town and pursued us—a smell like rotten fungi in old crypts. Sounds like the flapping of garments on a clothesline stole through the steady bass roar of the motor, and to my heavy eyes, tortured with staring into the yellow blur ahead, a vague shape seemed to float beside the car, a shape which was strangely human; erect, but rigid, flying along like a dry leaf upright in a gale.
I could see it only with the tail of my eye. It disappeared when I turned my head. It was clearest when I rolled my eyes high and looked through the lower part of the retina—a sort of second-sight, I suppose. The thing puzzled, angered, then frightened me. “Faster! Vite! Vite!” I yelled, suddenly grasping Pierre by the arm. The shadowy thing danced into the edges of the blur of light directly ahead. “Look out, Pierre!” The emergency brake came on with a grind and jolt, and the lights flared with the pulse of the engine. “It’s nothing,” I protested, half ashamed of myself, for evidently Pierre saw nothing. “Encore plus vite.”
We seemed to have lost the shadow-thing, until suddenly I discovered that there were others with it, swinging rigid through the fog like trees uprooted in a cyclone. My eyes were smarting with cold tears: it was like swimming with one’s eyes open in a stiff current. And all the time I watched the shadow-shapes gathering closer. Faintly luminous pale yellow blots seemed to grow in the dingy black of the racing forms. They were phosphorescent, as I think of them now. Something brushed my hair. A clicking sound like castanets came from the empty tonneau behind me, and then a whistling, like the speech of a man with no palate.
“Sssss—Feld—Feld—Feldwebel war ich, aus Bayern—sechs—sechsundzwanzigsten—infanterie Regiment.”
I turned my head with an involuntary sob. There was absolutely nothing in the car. Pierre put on brakes violently.
“Do you see anything?” I demanded.
“Nothing, monsieur.”
“Do you hear or smell anything?”
We listened and sniffed. “Nothing, monsieur,” Pierre said, quivering and crossing himself. The noise of the motor died, and we sat motionless in gruesome darkness listening to the hollow dripping of fog-water on the fallen leaves in the roadway. We were swallowed, lost in mist, with only a square yard of paved road visible before us. “Go on, Pierre,” I said softly.
Then gradually I saw the ghosts more plainly. A woman, bent like an old hinge, flung along beside the flying motor-car, and a naked, frightened child ran fearfully before her. “Ask him, Grutje, ask him about home!” a thin child-voice sobbed. A younger woman whose head had been hacked from her shoulders floated along with them, fondling the severed member and wailing, “De Deutschers—the Germans!” A group of mangled bodies of Belgian artillerymen hung like a swarm of bees together, mouthing curses as they flew, and a gigantic peasant, with clotted beard and arms stretched rigid in the form of a cross, stared with a face stabbed through and through like honey-comb.