round alley whose oppressive confinement chokes me. The human
forms prone on the stretchers are now hardly stirring under the
Jack-o'-lanterns of the candles; they stagnate in their rattling breath
and heavy groans.

On the edge of a stretcher a man is sitting, leaning against the wall.
His clothes are torn apart, and in the middle of their darkness appears
the white, emaciated breast of a martyr. His head is bent quite back
and veiled in shadow, but I can see the beating of his heart.

The daylight that is trickling through at the end, drop by drop, comes
in by an earth-fall. Several shells, falling on the same spot, have
broken through the heavy earthen roof of the Refuge.

Here, some pale reflections are cast on the blue of the greatcoats, on
the shoulders and along the folds. Almost paralyzed by the darkness and
their own weakness, a group of men is pressing towards the gap, like
dead men half awaking, to taste a little of the pallid air and detach
themselves from the sepulcher. This corner at the extremity of the
gloom offers itself as a way of escape, an oasis where one may stand
upright, where one is lightly, angelically touched by the light of
heaven.

"There were some chaps there that were blown to bits when the shells
burst," said some one to me who was waiting there in the sickly ray of
entombed light. "You talk about a mess! Look, there's the padre hooking
down what was blown up."

The huge Red Cross sergeant, in a hunter's chestnut waistcoat which
gives him the chest of a gorilla, is detaching the pendent entrails
twisted among the beams of the shattered woodwork. For the purpose he
is using a rifle with fixed bayonet, since he could not find a stick
long enough; and the heavy giant, bald, bearded and asthmatic, wields
the weapon awkwardly. He has a mild face, meek and unhappy, and while
he tries to catch the remains of intestines in the corners, he mutters
a string of "Oh's!" like sighs. His eyes are masked by blue glasses;
his breathing is noisy. The top of his head is of puny dimensions, and
the huge thickness of his neck has a conical shape. To see him thus
pricking and unhanging from the air strips of viscera and rags of
flesh, you could take him for a butcher at some fiendish task.

But I let myself fall in a corner with my eyes half closed, seeing
hardly anything of the spectacle that lies and palpitates and falls
around me. Indistinctly I gather some fragments of sentences--still the
horrible