We watch this shapeless being, this thing, leaving our lines and going away yonder.
We only see one—perhaps that is the shadow of another, on his left.
We do not understand, and then we do. It is the end of the attacking wave.
What can his thoughts be—this man alone in the rain as if under a curse, who goes upright away, forward, when space is changed into a shrieking machine? By the light of a cascade of flashes I thought I saw a strange monk-like face. Then I saw more clearly—the face of an ordinary man, muffled in a comforter.
"It's a chap of the 150th, not the 129th," stammers a voice by my side.
We do not know, except that it is the end of the attacking wave.
When he has disappeared among the eddies, another follows him at a distance, and then another. They pass by, separate and solitary, delegates of death, sacrificers and sacrificed. Their great-coats fly wide; and we, we press close to each other in our corner of night; we push and hoist ourselves with our rusted muscles, to see that void and those great scattered soldiers.
We return to the shelter, which is plunged in darkness. The motor-cyclist's voice obtrudes itself to the point that we think we can see his black armor. He is describing the "carryings on" at Bordeaux in September, when the Government was there. He tells of the festivities, the orgies, the expenditure, and there is almost a tone of pride in the poor creature's voice as he recalls so many pompous pageants all at once.
But the uproar outside silences us. Our funk-hole trembles and cracks. It is the barrage—the barrage which those whom we saw have gone to fight, hand to hand. A thunderbolt falls just at the opening, it casts a bright light on all of us, and reveals the last emotion of all, the belief that all was ended! One man is grimacing like a malefactor caught in the act; another is opening strange, disappointed eyes; another is swinging his doleful head, enslaved by the love of sleep, and another, squatting with his head in his hands, makes a lurid entanglement. We have seen each other—upright, sitting or crucified—in the second of broad daylight which came into the bowels of the earth to resurrect our darkness.
In a moment, when the guns chance to take breath, a voice at the door-hole calls us: