The ghost mass was vital with movement, there was indeed a low decrepitation in the spaces above us, and an incessant arrowy flight of forms, or veils of forms, where, too, faces shone, half traceable in features, half blurred, as in a sheen that erased them, as soon as seen. And those faces! They were not the presentiments of color and shade and shadow, perhaps, as a pictorial fact. No, not that—they were evocative lights, that created in my mind's eye, an image as it were, of a living face, and they were most solemn, most sad; in them dwelt an irretrievable impress of desolation. A wave of gloom overwhelmed me. The ground beneath me seemed sinking, I caught Gabrielle to my breast, and, as if in an engulfing swarm of myriads and myriads of stars, I fell to the ground.
The day had again risen, and our neighborhoods still showed the recumbent acres of motionless figures—we had moved on far to the north and westward—the huge aggregations had here drawn together and the trench lines of the hostile armies were scarcely three hundred metres apart. In the French and in the German battalions that indescribable unrest of FEAR that Quintado had predicted was now easily detected. This opened up a more singular and a deeply interesting panorama. By ones and twos, by hundreds and by thousands, slowly, slowly, the immense leaven of repentance of the unsearchable agony of a mingled moral and physical pain, was lifting them from the first stupor, and we could see the figures struggling to their feet, we could see their dazed, horrified, and distorted features, their exchanges of questioning glances, almost as if in their friends, they saw their foes. Nothing more utterly diableresque could be imagined.
Over ourselves had now been developed a great change of feeling. It was the second day of the miraculous intervention, and we had become imbued with the meaning of the miracle. It meant the End of the War, and it meant too a startling Enlightenment. The nations should put an end to their insane rivalries. The era of a divine economy and brotherhood was about to dawn upon the puerile egotism of the world. A new insight deep and revolutionary would adapt the coming centuries to new ends. So an exultation born of this divination urged us to watch and record the accuracy of the prediction. We became neutralized in sympathy by reason of an exorbitant curiosity, and from camp to camp, turning now to the enemy and now to the friend, we pursued our way, that monstrous and wonderful day. The dramatic intensity of it—albeit not a word was spoken in those marshalled millions—surpasses relation. At one moment we watched a group of Germans starting to their feet with consternation in their faces, their arms waving in protest, their features wearing a hundred expressions, terror, maddened wonder, abject subjection, grimness, a mixed commotion of tempers that rolled their eyes, and jerked their lips, and contorted their limbs. And then these initial emotions succumbed to the overpowering sense of torment, and on that followed their convulsive efforts to rise and flee. And their flight was impossible; their feet stuck to the earth, where they stood, and their most violent efforts tumbled them headlong to the ground, and thus quivering into quietness, like the palpitations of a dying animal, they lay motionless.
At another moment we gazed upon the French, behind entanglements of wire, with fierce-looking and harsh iron-toothed fences, near a millsite where the shattering shells had ploughed their desolating way through solid masonry, while beneath it the tortuous crawling boyaux journeyed on for miles. Here was a company of the chasseurs-a-pieds, the bravest of the Frenchmen whose dauntless courage and resolution in the face of death, like some fatalistic spell, had made them motionless under fire, and furious, with a whirlwind of roused premonitions of success, in their lightning charges. I knew of them well. These stem gallants of the battle field, were crowding the apertures of their underground burrows, and many had pulled themselves into the remnants of grass and clover, even sprinkled, as with dashes of blood, with carmine blossoms, at the lips of their retreats. Their faces expressed, with a wide difference of interior consciousness, the same amazement that had clouded the German faces, but here, in the Frenchmen, the amazement participated with a half revealed penitence, the stricken sense of sorrow, and of an awakening realization of an oncoming transformation. Intelligence beautified its misery with the colors of a mild, yes, an expostulating contrition. I watched them with an understanding sympathy. The dismay, the terror even, was all there, and that distinguishable physical suffering that was the prologue to their mutual surrender to the mission of Peace that the Spirits brought. But what else was there? Was that invisible multitude of the dead individualized to each and every man of the vast armies? Did these men, thus quenched in the waters of a mental and bodily affliction, hear unspoken words, see the faces of their lost comrades, and did they feel the piercing ardor of their contact with the revealing dead? Who shall say? As with the Germans they too had essayed Flight, and their will was helpless in the strangling grip of the vast prostration. There stayed the tremendous equipment of the nation, helpless as a nursery of children.
I spoke to these men, bending over them with Gabrielle, but there was no recognition. They stared at me as if eyeless, or deprived of vision. If I shouted in their ears, there was no response. If I tugged at their limbs they acted as inert figures of clay. And yet there was expression in their faces. What could it mean? Was all their attention focussed upon an interior illumination while their outward senses remained calloused in some impossible apathy?
And then we approached the lines of the stalwart English fighters. At one point spread a cantonment of infantry, rayed with bands of artillery, and flanked by the surcharged battalions of horsemen. The field view was picturesque. It was east of Landrecies where early in the war the English had met the Germans in withering combat. It was a shallow sweeping basin-like valley, between two wooded hills, where the thick set trees, shielded by some whim of accident, yet preserved their branches and uncrippled growth, and wore the blazonry of spring. A narrow stream crossed by a hump-backed bridge traversed the foreground, and beyond the stream eastward rolled a meadowland. Beyond that somewhere lay the slumbering Germans. But their puissant foes were slumbering too. The valley stretch was filled, like an overflowing bowl, with the English troops, and in hedges, in human sheaves, in rows, as in wind-swept, rain-beaten fields of high grass, the soldiers tossed their pain-racked bodies. We had become accustomed to the grotesque predicament and entered the camps, where we were tempted by the rudeness or wonder of the spectacle, with a stolid confidence. Our own strength too seemed inexhaustible. We were immune from the wide gathering Paralysis. Indeed a sort of exultation now surged within us as we began to see that Quintado's prophecy approached its certain conclusion, the END of the WAR. It almost filled us with gayety. We could have shouted a Te Deum.
I pointed out to Gabrielle a low farm house upon the northern hillside, and we made our way there among the masses of men, actually stepping upon them, as though they clothed the ground with a human corduroy. We opened the swinging door and walked into a room fitted out as a headquarters. Its floor was dotted with the recumbent figures of officers. Those mighty men plotting their strategies had been overcome by a strategy more sublime, and overthrown, with the benumbing exhalations of the heavenly armies, sprawled upon the tables, over the chairs, and the General curled ludicrously upon the floor. I could have laughed at the humiliation of the scene, except that for an instant I doubted my senses. It had all the inane inconsequence of a dream.
Behind the front room of the little house was a messroom, and there the same talismanic somnolence had pitched its occupants on floor and table. I gathered some untouched food, and Gabrielle and I retreated. As we emerged and our eyes surveyed the prodigious debacle, there rose from the disordered companies a titanic sigh—like the possible suspiration of an agonized monster—and visibly those thousands, weltering together in panic, rose to their feet, and with uplifted arms, their fingers clutching convulsively at nothing, struggled mightily to move. It was as Quintado had spoken: