We threaded our way through the thickly filled ranks of soldiers—we had passed by the wagons of ammunition, the ambulance corps, the vast enceinte of kitchen equipments—and everywhere was the stupefaction of utter apathy, here and there in individuals beginning to assume consciousness, with the twitching pains of increasing misery, that we had been told would be both physical and mental, the double excruciation of pain and remorse. But what a sight!
The inveterate poignancy of my wonder and my curious freedom from the omnipresent influence—derived somehow from Gabrielle's immunity—kept me vigilant and observing. Gabrielle was constantly at my side, but she seemed less intent upon seeing, as upon ceaselessly going on. We advanced carefully between files of men, from whose hands guns and swords had fallen, as their owners succumbed to the incredible stupor. The relaxed arms had dropped the guns, the nerveless fingers released the control, the stricken bodies had reeled to the ground. We stepped over the motionless heaps of men who had sunk together in twisted groups of overlaid bodies and sprawling limbs—as I had seen the dead at Landrecies and at Coulommiers—steeped in this etherial opiate. We came upon battalions of cavalry slowly dissolving in a confusion of riderless horses. The riders had fallen from their saddles, or lay forward upon the necks of their horses, as if drugged with sleep. The horses were moving this way and that, confused, startled, neighing in their bewilderment, or, with wild eyes, struggling in broken companies to escape the weird strangeness of being unbidden, missing the familiar voices, the guiding check. Numbers slowly ambled away, their masters falling to the ground, pulling the belly-bands of the saddles after them, while, most miraculously, their imprisoned feet freed themselves from the stirrups, and the disengaged animals moved continuously away.
In the trickery of this supernatural stagnation there was no real panic among the animals, and the horses watching the ground seemed instinct with intelligence. I felt DIRECTION over-ruling circumstance. Occasionally incongruous predicaments arose, as when a cavalry man had fallen backward over his horse's broad back, and his head rolled slowly over the horse's rump with the latter's oscillation. A few riders were dragged onward with the horses, but they seemed finally to become disentangled and slumped to the ground. It was a bizarre disorganization, wherein the rigorous modernity of detail and preparation, had been hopelessly dispelled under a divine disintegration.
Indeed a portentous trance had gripped the millions of men. In its ensnarement they lay like corpses, hither, thither, rolled into masses, carpeting the ground in phalanxes, drooping upon each other in mimic embraces, or leaning in thick palisades of bodies like clustered logs. It seemed a vast immeasurable inebriety.
And the shadowy host? Where was it? The daylight illumined the interminable vistas. The wind blew softly over a spring landscape. The white flecks of clouds drifted as usual across the feebly bluescent sky. Nothing on earth was different except this palsied host, before, behind, around us. The similitudes from legend and romance came to my mind; the bolstered court in the Sleeping Beauty, the stricken seneschals in Consuelo, the death masque in Vathek, the rigid warriors with Frederick Barbarossa in the subterranean halls of earth, waiting their summons to leap forth in battle, the lifeless bodies in the pit that Sinbad saw.
But the invisible PRESENCE that held this world of men stiffened into immobility. What was it? Where was it? We moved through it, Gabrielle and I, but felt nothing; nothing more than the faintly heated air of spring. Would it shine illimitably again at night? Well, we should see. And the Enemy—How was it with them? The thought made us hasten.
We had walked until noon, and had reached the trenches. There stretched the pitch-forked angular line, the shelters, the dug-outs, the wire embarbments, the peering snouts of cannon. Men had crawled out and lay recumbent in the full light unharmed. We stole furtively into one subterranean cave. Behind the front space against a wall of half dripping clay ran backward a narrow room. In its centre a table was spread with the rude service of dishes, and behind that again a ruder grotto held a fire-place where a blaze of wood was charring a forgotten leg of mutton. Around the table slept twenty men, and an officer at its head groaned uneasily. Boyau after boyau was entered, and always the arrested work, the drugged sleepers. From point to point, like rabbits hanging on the lips of their warrens, men were revealed, half exposed, half hidden. But no murderous fire despatched them. The enemy too slumbered. We looked that way. The ground over which our eyes searched eastward and northward, was ploughed with the horrid ruts of shells, beaten into mud slowly drying in barren cankerous tracts of dust, or gouged with holes, while mounds rose intermittently, whose washed sides disclosed the limbs of buried men. Perhaps half a kilometre away on hillsides, in valleys, through the frayed margins of woods, thrashed into splinters by the shells, ran a crease, like a smeared titanic pencil mark, where now we knew the Teuton, the unspeakable Boche, snored unresistingly and oblivious.
We essayed the experiment of seeing if it was indeed so. In the dying day we crossed that silent tract, and safely, in a zone which for months had trembled beneath the explosions of shells, where sudden sorties had filled it with the clash of arms, or sent along its pale yellow and black surfaces the groans, the prayers, the gasps of dying soldiers. Now it was a graveyard only, and as silent as the place of tombs. We entered the lines of the enemy—and there—stark in the embrace of the Paralysis the mighty German, officer and men, yes, generals and—at the very point of our first contact with them—a prince too, rolled ignominiously together, in the suffocation of this asphyxia. It was a humiliating discomfiture. It confounded appreciation for distinction. They were thrown down along the banks in droves, and backward in the avenues of approach the legions upon legions slept. It made me think of the rafts of logs upon Texan rivers caught in inextricable confusion, tilted, submerged, locked, and tumbling over each other in heaving booms, as the tides jammed them together in thicker and denser snags.
Strangely unbelievable it seemed, those stunned masses of men! The setting sun sent its rays upon them and, through an exact orientation in spots of the serried helmets, they were returned in a blaze of reflected light. We wandered on, along the edges of this sea of faces, dreading to penetrate their ranks. There was an unearthly horribleness in it all, as if an Universal Death had expelled Life from the earth, and in the continental solitude we alone lived. I shuddered, with a sickness of despair at my heart, wondering if indeed we should see the dawn of the Last Judgment.
And now a marvelous thing happened. Gabrielle and I had retreated from the German line, slowly, with bowed heads hurrying towards our countrymen, when, as the day darkened, the air above us, with an infinity of sparklings, like a scattered ignition in combustibles, resumed slowly its supernatural brilliancy. The great ghost bank enveloped us. We quailed beneath it. We clung together, thrilled and speechless, in the immersing splendors of the heavenly light; the radiance of unnumbered souls. We could not see within it as we had seen when without its limits. It dazzled our eyes, and for the first time I felt a singular numbness creeping upward in my limbs, an insuperable heaviness in my head, and dull reiterating beats in my ears. Gabrielle seemed almost lifeless.