ack
Ramure in extremis, who is waiting for me. But Joseph clings to me, and
then I notice a movement of men about the spot where I left the dying
man. I can guess what it means; it is no longer worth while to go there.

The ground of the ravine where we two are closely clustered to abide
the tempest is quivering, and at each shot we feel the deep simoom of
the shells. But in the hole where we are there is scarcely any risk of
being hit. At the first lull, some of the men who were also waiting
detach themselves and begin to go up; stretcher-bearers redouble their
huge efforts to carry a body and climb, making one think of stubborn
ants pushed back by successive grains of sand; wounded men and liaison
men move again.

"Let's go on," says Joseph, with sagging shoulders, as he measures the
hill with his eye--the last stage of his Gethsemane.

There are trees here; a row of excoriated willow trunks, some of wide
countenance, and others hollowed and yawning, like coffins on end. The
scene through which we are struggling is rent and convulsed, with hills
and chasms, and with such somber swellings as if all the clouds of
storm had rolled down here. Above the tortured earth, this stampeded
file of trunks stands forth against a striped brown sky, milky in
places and obscurely sparkling--a sky of agate.

Across the entry to Trench 97 a felled oak twists his great body, and a
corpse stops up the trench. Its head and legs are buried in the ground.
The dirty water that trickles in the trench has covered it with a sandy
glaze, and through the moist deposit the chest and belly bulge forth,
clad in a shirt. We stride over the frigid remains, slimy and pale,
that suggest the belly of a stranded crocodile; and it is difficult to
do so, by reason of the soft and slippery ground. We have to plunge our
hands up to the wrists in the mud of the wall.

At this moment an infernal whistle falls on us and we bend like bushes.
The shell bursts in the air in front of us, deafening and blinding, and
buries us under a horribly sibilant mountain of dark smoke. A climbing
soldier has churned the air with his arms and disappeared, hurled into
some hole. Shouts have gone up and fallen again like rubbish. While we
are looking, through the great black veil that the wind tears from the
ground and dismisses into the sky, at the bearers who are putting down
a stretcher, running to the place of the explosion and picking up
something inert--I recall the unf