shows on the other side of the water. The man
has been buried in his dug-out and has had only the time to thrust out
his arm.

Quite near, we notice that some mounds of earth aligned along the
ruined ramparts of this deep-drowned ditch are human. Are they dead--or
asleep? We do not know; in any case, they rest.

Are they German or French? We do not know. One of them has opened his
eyes, and looks at us with swaying head. We say to him, "French?"--and
then, "Deutsch?" He makes no reply, but shuts his eyes again and
relapses into oblivion. We never knew what he was.

We cannot decide the identity of these beings, either by their clothes,
thickly covered with filth, or by their head-dress, for they are
bareheaded or swathed in woolens under their liquid and offensive
cowls; or by their weapons, for they either have no rifles or their
hands rest lightly on something they have dragged along, a shapeless
and sticky mass, like to a sort of fish.

All these men of corpse-like faces who are before us and behind us, at
the limit of their strength, void of speech as of will, all these
earth-charged men who you would say were carrying their own
winding-sheets, are as much alike as if they were naked. Out of the
horror of the night apparitions are issuing from this side and that who
are clad in exactly the same uniform of misery and mud.

It is the end of all. For the moment it is the prodigious finish, the
epic cessation of the war.

I once used to think that the worst hell in war was the flame of
shells; and then for long I thought it was the suffocation of the
caverns which eternally confine us. But it is neither of these. Hell is
water.

The wind is rising, and its icy breath goes through our flesh. On the
wrecked and dissolving plain, flecked with bodies between its
worm-shaped chasms of water, among the islands of motionless men stuck
together like reptiles, in this flattening and sinking chaos there are
some slight indications of movement. We see slowly stirring groups and
fragments of groups, composed of beings who bow under the weight of
their coats and aprons of mud, who trail themselves along, disperse,
and crawl about in the depths of the sky's tarnished light. The dawn is
so foul that one would say the day was already done.

These survivors are migrating across the desolated steppe, pursued by
an unspeakable evil which exhausts and bewilders them. They are
lamentable objects; and some, when they are fully seen