There was the last kiss, the fixed, tangible second when you part for good and the yard of space between you actually counts. You were two bodies clasped, then you became only one body, two arms ... a soul locked in a leaden coffin.
There were the wretched minutes when you summon all your illusions to your assistance. "Nothing can possibly happen to him ... of course not to him...."
I returned, dragging my misery like a chain. I was one of the vast herd which fretted the surface of the earth like a canker, moulded and moved by a deadly maniac hand.... Never before has there been such a herd.
Being a woman, I felt withdrawn from the herd, exactly as I had felt on the first day of the war that humanity was cut in two—men and women.
I was impotent, curdled, set aside. Like the other women I passed by the young men with orders to die and only a few days to live, though their bearing was of men who had long to live. I passed by the other women, useless flesh of the earth, faint-hearted flesh for grieving....
I went.... In another sense it was the herd that passed by, that she-thing, in countless numbers, dancing bacchantes with hideous hyena-laughter and robes smelling of red blood and heavy wine, compliant....
You no longer saw yourself, because you had been swallowed up in a living craw.
Where were you, my sisters from everywhere, women of Europe, you, Trude and Clara and Mania? What were you doing? Were you weeping?
You saw, didn't you, that bloody sky with forked black signs, that summer swooning away, that day?... Why was not your voice heard in denunciation of the universal slaughter?