Alone!
If a splinter of a shell hits me, no one will be with me during my last moments to listen to my final wishes. I continue my way under the rain of shells.
Why I have not already been blown to pieces or buried I do not know. How little one feels in the face of this formidable power!
I turn around. On both sides and behind me there is no one! I am in a desert in which a hail of fire falls. Will I get there?
At every step I cross, touch, jump over, as I run against them, formless corpses, cut to pieces, or doubled into knots.
Perhaps in a moment I shall be like them, disemboweled and my brains running out, or like those over there buried under rubbish and dirt. I can see a foot here, an arm there; they are entombed forever. I shall be listed among the missing, and my family and those who love me will cling to this shred of hope—that the missing is perhaps not dead.
I go on steadily.
Abruptly, I experience a nervous reaction. I laugh.... I become a fatalist! And after?... I shall not be alone. That’s the common lot of millions of men.
What is going to happen will happen. Forward.