fire. He was hurled backward upon
the road and lay half-stunned, while the earth discharged itself into
the air with a roar like that of ten thousand shells exploding all
together. The ground shook, groaned, grumbled, grated, and showers of
boards, earth, branches, rocks, vegetables, tiles, and all sorts of
unrecognizable and grotesque objects fell from the sky all about him. It
was like a gigantic and never-ending mine, or series of mines, in
continuous explosion, a volcano pouring itself upward out of the bowels
of an incandescent earth. Above the earsplitting thunder of the eruption
he heard shrill cries and raucous shoutings. Mounted men dashed past him
down the road, singly and in squadrons. A molten globe dropped through
the branches of the poplar, and striking the hard surface of the road at
a distance of fifty yards scattered itself like a huge ingot dropped
from a blast furnace. Great clouds of dust descended and choked him. A
withering heat enveloped him....

It was noon next day when Karl Biedenkopf raised his head and looked
about him. He thought first there had been a battle. But the sight that
met his eyes bore no resemblance to a field of carnage. Over his head he
noticed that the uppermost branches of the poplar had been seared as by
fire. The road looked as if the countryside had been traversed by a
hurricane. All sorts of debris filled the fields and everywhere there
seemed to be a thick deposit of blackened earth. Vaguely realizing that
he must report for duty, he crawled, in spite of his bursting head and
aching limbs, on all fours down the road toward the village.

But he could not find the village. There was no village there; and soon
he came to what seemed to be the edge of a gigantic crater, where the
earth had been uprooted and tossed aside as if by some huge convulsion
of nature. Here and there masses of inflammable material smoked and
flickered with red flames. His eyes sought the familiar outlines of the
redoubts and fortifications, but found them not. And where the village
had been there was a great cavern in the earth, and the deepest part of
the cavern, or so it seemed to his half-blinded sight, was at about the
point where the cottage had stood which his general had used as his
headquarters, the spot where the night before that general had raised
his glass of bubbling wine and toasted "Thanatos," the personification
of death, and called his officers to witness that this was the greatest