“Because, sir, he’s crazy. Last night he got to talkin’ to dead men, and when they didn’t answer he shook them as if he thought they was alive.”
“Be off with you,” the captain replied, giving the loader no more attention.
Hicks in the lead, the three men started off toward the German lines, to halt half-way, thus to be enabled to inform the platoon if the enemy were attacking. Perhaps four hundreds of yards from the German lines Hicks stopped beside a mound of earth wide enough to conceal the bodies of the three men.
“You fellows lie down here. I’ve got to get my gun.”
They looked at him agape as he strode toward the enemy’s line near which lay his discarded rifle.
An ochre cannon-ball lay suspended in the soft blue sky. Efflorescent clouds, like fresh chrysanthemums, were piled high atop one another, their tips transuded with golden beams. The sky was divided into slices of faint pink, purple, and orange.
On the drab earth, beaten lifeless by carnage and corruption, drab bodies lay, oozing thin streams of pink blood, which formed dark, mysterious little pools by their sides. Jaws were slack—dark, objectionable caverns in pallid faces. Some men still moaned, or, in a tone into which discouragement had crept, called for help.
Each body was alone, drawn apart from its companions by its separate and incommunicable misery. The bodies would remain alone until to-morrow or the day after to-morrow, when they would be furnishing a festival for the bugs which now only inquisitively inspected them.