(A study of Serb infantry in battle, 1914)
There is no moon. In black darkness a long file of men stumbles up a stony gully. Precipitous rock-walls keep them to the bed of a vanished stream, where they trip in succession over the same loose boulders. Their curses are hushed instantly by voices not less authoritative because they bark in whispers. Wrapped in long sheepskin coats the figures pass like ghosts of an antique time, whose grimness is accentuated by the incongruity of modern rifles with fixed bayonets that glint under the myriad stars. Presently the head of the file halts in what seems a black pit, the edge of which cuts sharply against the star-powdered bluish darkness of the sky. Those behind arrive continuously, collect in the hollow, are formed into ranks by sergeants who bully sotto voce like angry conspirators. The company commander is crawling on hands and knees up the wall of the hollow, which is not so precipitous as it appears in the darkness.
The captain peers cautiously over the crest. He sees only blackness which rises all around him from an abyss that reflects no ray in its profundity, and blots out the stars high in the sky with irregular cones and shapeless masses of inky night. From those mountains a wind blows chilly on his face. He fixes his gaze upon a point in the blackness far across the gulf. The point is decided upon after careful reference to a phosphorescent compass in his hand. He stares at this blank darkness until it almost seems that he must be staring against closed lids.
Suddenly in the gloom at which he strains his eyes, he perceives a pin-point of light. It flickers for an instant and then projects itself in a ray of intense brilliance widening from the point of origin, right across the gulf. It falls in a great oval of blinding whiteness upon the hill-side to his right. Its hard white glare is painful in its brutality. Everything outside the ray is swallowed in a blackness where even the stars are lost. The white oval on the hill-side moves slowly. It brings into vivid relief a long line of loosely piled stones behind which lie, in many attitudes, the motionless bodies of men. Some, which have fallen across the heap of stones, throw grotesque shadows, intensely black. The white oval stays its slow progress, vignettes them from the night. In the centre of the picture one of these figures stirs, raises itself upon one elbow and rubs its eyes stupidly like a man wakened from sleep by the sudden glare.
Instantly a group of sharp reports, multiplied by rapidly reiterated echoes, breaks from the distant blackness. The figure sinks quickly, a dark hole visible in the ghastly whiteness of its face. The oval begins to move again, assuring the men who lurk far back in the night that this uncompleted shelter-trench is held only by the dead.
Suddenly the light is cut off. The stars reappear in a sky that seems strangely pallid. The mountain masses silhouette themselves more definitely than before against their tenebrous background, the outlines of the high summits, where some snow still lies, picked out in a grey that has just the faintest tinge of yellow. From the black gulf below eddies of mist boil up like steam from a mighty cauldron, veiling the shrinking stars. A wall of fog rolls along the hill-side, blots out the mountains and the sky.