Now!
Then—A-a-h!
The vault of Heaven has cracked above us, and has spurted down on to the sand from above. Life is lying there, wriggling on the earth, and the hands that were clawing the ground are now clutching idly at the shattered air. I rise to my feet again.... I have not been hit. But the man who leaped up beside me—he is lying flat in the sand and screaming in a broken voice. He is lying as if he had been nailed firmly through his stomach to the earth, and as if he could not get free again. The body itself is dead, only the arms and legs are still alive. And arms and legs are working wildly through the air.
"Up! Get up! Quick march!" a voice yells in our ears. We no longer know who it is shouting to us, and we don't know from what quarter they have called us.... We leap to our feet. We leave the captain and the wounded in their blood; we start up and run away, and are running a race with the shells, for we are running for our bare, naked life. But the shells have the legs of us. They catch us up from behind in our backs, and wherever the invisible sheaf plunges hissing down, men are falling with it and rolling, helter-skelter in their blood. But we speed away over twitching and dismembered bodies, and over bodies turning somersaults, and look neither to the right nor to the left. We are on the run, and shrink into ourselves as we run. We draw our necks deep between our shoulders, for every man feels that the next moment his head will be leaping out from between his shoulder-blades from behind.
And eyes of iron are glaring at us from behind. The swamp! The swamp! The thought suddenly uprears its head in me. We are running blindly straight into the swamp. Only another twenty paces now—already the foremost have reached it, and, senseless in their terror, jump into it—the water spurts up high—and now—what has happened now? Their feet are stuck fast—they tilt over forwards—they claw for something to hold on to—the rifle flies out of their hand—and face forward they plunge into the water—and close on our heels they come stamping up—the tight-packed, maddened mob....
"Back! Get back!"
But every one has ceased to be conscious of what he is doing. And though our eyes start out of our head at the terror we see in front of us, Death is breathing its cold breath into the back of our neck.
And into the gurgling water, wriggling with bodies and alive with lungs, over human bodies writhing beneath the water, Death tramples us to the other bank. Any man who goes down is lost, for they are pressing on behind us past all holding. The water is already up to our armpits. But there is a firm bottom beneath our feet. True, the bottom may clutch at us, and cling round our feet. True, the water may bite savagely at our flesh with teeth and with nails. But whatever may be trying to draw us down to itself from below, we trample underfoot. The shoulders of a form emerge; they plunge down again, and disappear. The faces of drowning men emerge and cleave to the light, and sink gurgling into the depths. Lost arms wave about in the air and try to find support on the surface of the water. We dodge these arms, for whomever they may seize they draw down with them to Death.
And in the thick of this hurly-burly of Death, amid these whistling lungs, amid these panting, red, panic-stricken faces, the cloud of shells strikes home, and hurls its hail of iron overhead. The water spurts up in jets.
And again!