"There will be no Flight; the pain will manacle their feet, will stifle their voices, will wither their wills—one monstrous Stupor will overcome them, and for three days, like the men overcome with sleep that watched the Apostle Saint Peter in the prison the armies of the Nations will sleep—Ay, and sleep in PAIN."
We were in the environs of Arras, and it was the very evening of the third day. Our pilgrimage had passed along the zigzagging frontiers of the marshalled armies, and everywhere it had been the same—the coma, the recurrent efforts at escape, the nerveless surrender to imprisonment. And what was happening beyond those frontiers of the armies we knew nothing of. In the civilian populations of France and of Germany, and beyond them in the widened circles of national conflict, in England, in Russia, in Belgium, in Turkey, and the Balkans was this tremendous visitation recognized? Was the strange metempsychosis effecting there too its intangible reconciliations? Between the double cordon of the armies, moving along the broad and narrow corridor that separated their lines, we were excluded from the world. Around us lay the sleepers, shuddering in unutterable nightmares, and in our diversified roadway there was nothing but the ruins of villages, the shattered walls, the holed ground, the catacombs of trenches, deflowered woods, the sinuous storm-marked track of war's desolation. We, Gabrielle and I, alone lived in this camerated solitude. But it was the third day and then—what? Ah, what indeed?
We had made great strides toward the north, and our rapid march had been hastened by the use of the horses of the troopers. I was not unfamiliar—from my experiences in Texas—with the management of horses and in this living cenotaph wherein we moved the animals alone seemed living. Everywhere they were found strayed and masterless, and seemingly confused, foraging as best they might upon the scanty herbage, in the ruined fields, and probably escaping beyond the army confines into the surrounding country. I found two most serviceable mares, and, as Gabrielle was a good equestrienne, our journey was more rapid, while it too grew more and more fabulous, gathering to itself like a figment of fiction, the unreal, the incredible and in it rested the denouement of a great mystery. All through the night, the dazzling luminousness dwelt upon the earth, all the day it was unseen, though potent, and now the termination of its mission drew near. What then?
Near Vitry between Arras and Douay is a raised mound, a long softly swelling protuberance in the undulating landscape, uncrowned by any structure. The village lies somewhere west of it, and it commands, almost uninterruptedly, the view running north and south through the avenue of a slightly winding valley. You can see the village lights from its summit, and you can hear the church bells there too, when the wind is west. It was on this modest elevation that we pitched our camp, when the ghost fog "lifted." Almost, as if at the finale of a grand play, Gabrielle and I waited for that last night. The day died slowly and it grew colder. Thin clouds thickened into denser volumes and the sky became overcast. Starlets of snow dropped through the air. A timely shelter was provided for us in the barracks of an old sheepfold, and the thoughtful provision of some blankets, taken by me from one of the camps, kept us warm, and so we watched the fading day. Again, as always, that outpoured ocean of light, less shimmering than at first, less moving, less inconstant with variation, as if in the very thought of its countless denizens the premonition of retreat made a thoughtful stillness. We did not tremble as at first, at its envelopment, rather it seemed a benison of blessed promises. It lay over the armies, it penetrated them, soaking them with the flood of its spiritual waves, an effluence indescribably, insufferably desolating. To us it was simply an unnatural splendor.
As the night came on Gabrielle became distrait and restless. I feared again some nervous breakdown. There was a deeper fear. The fear of spoliation, her robbery from me by the mystic invaders, the evocation of her very soul into that retiring vortex of spiritual life. She should not go. I pressed her closely to me. I kissed her lips, and muttered, as if in desperation that she should promise me, not to follow that elusive host. My terror rose because she did not answer. It almost seemed that she did not hear me. What other voices stole, were stealing, away her allegiance?
At midnight the glory of the light was supreme. It became a homogeneous radiance, like the solid glow of the melted metals in the furnaces. An hour later great billows coursed through it, and the wavering crests smote each other, and when this collision occurred the light darkened with broad paths of extinction; an instant after the glooms vanished in the recurrent glory. It was then that I saw currents in flashing streams, push upward, and then more, and more, and more, as if, sucked up into some opening receptacle, the conflux had begun to separate itself from the earth. Its swift motion begot a sound like the trilling of innumerable violins, a keen and yet delicate staccato of quick notes, and suddenly looking over towards the horizon, I realized that indeed the whole composition, complex, and solution was sinking upward into the zenith. And Gabrielle?
I caught her in my arms more closely, and in the sepulchral light saw her face as if filmed already with the pallor of death. A smile gleamed there too, and a voice spoke in my ears. I looked above me. Again that haunting form and face of Sebastien Quintado, and with it—O my God—the entwined wraith of my sister. The dead body was in my arms, the creature was fleeing beyond my hold. I sprang to my feet, and yet clinging to the dead figure of Gabrielle, lying on my breast, I raised an imploring hand, and cried out in the oncoming darkness—fit symbol of my despair: