and the little heaps of the villages the roads run like white
cotton. You can make out, too, some hollow threads that look as if
they'd been traced with a pin-point and scratched through fine sand.
These nets that festoon the plain with regularly wavy marks, they're
the trenches. Last Sunday morning I was flying over the firing-line.
Between our first lines and their first lines, between their extreme
edges, between the fringes of the two huge armies that are up against
each other, looking at each other and not seeing, and waiting--it's not
very far; sometimes forty yards, sometimes sixty. To me it looked about
a stride, at the great height where I was planing. And behold I could
make out two crowds, one among the Boches, and one of ours, in these
parallel lines that seemed to touch each other; each was a solid,
lively lump, and all around 'em were dots like grains of black sand
scattered on gray sand, and these hardly budged--it didn't look like an
alarm! So I went down several turns to investigate.

"Then I understood. It was Sunday, and there were two religious
services being held under my eyes--the altar, the padre, and all the
crowd of chaps. The more I went down the more I could see that the two
things were alike--so exactly alike that it looked silly. One of the
services--whichever you like--was a reflection of the other, and I
wondered if I was seeing double. I went down lower; they didn't fire at
me. Why? I don't know at all. Then I could hear. I heard one murmur,
one only. I could only gather a single prayer that came up to me en
bloc, the sound of a single chant that passed by me on its way to
heaven. I went to and fro in space to listen to this faint mixture of
hymns that blended together just the same although they were one
against the other; and the more they tried to get on top of each other,
the more they were blended together up in the heights of the sky where
I was floating.

"I got some shrapnel just at the moment when, very low down, I made out
the two voices from the earth that made up the one--'Gott mit uns!' and
'God is with us!'--and I flew away."

The young man shook his bandage-covered head; he seemed deranged by the
recollection. "I said to myself at the moment, 'I must be mad!'"

"It's the truth of things that's mad," said the zouave.

With his eyes shining in delirium, the narrator sought to express and
convey the deep disturbing idea that was besieging him, that he was
struggling again