. Some men are steering for us,
reeling. They lean over us and speak in low and weary tones. One of
them says, "Sie sind todt. Wir bleiben hier." (They're dead. We'll stay
here.) The other says, "Ja," like a sigh.

But they see us move, and at once they sink in front of us. The man
with the toneless voice says to us in French, "We surrender," and they
do not move. Then they give way entirely, as if this was the relief,
the end of their torture; and one of them whose face is patterned in
mud like a savage tattooed, smiles slightly.

"Stay there," says Paradis, without moving the head that he leans
backward upon a hillock; "presently you shall go with us if you want."

"Yes," says the German, "I've had enough." We make no reply, and he
says, "And the others too?"

"Yes," says Paradis, "let them stop too, if they like." There are four
of them outstretched on the ground. The death-rattle has got one of
them. It is like a sobbing song that rises from him. The others then
half straighten themselves, kneeling round him, and roll great eyes in
their muck-mottled faces. We get up and watch the scene. But the rattle
dies out, and the blackened throat which alone in all the big body
pulsed like a little bird, is still.

"Er ist todt!" (He's dead) says one of the men, beginning to cry. The
others settle themselves again to sleep. The weeper goes to sleep as he
weeps.

Other soldiers have come, stumbling, gripped in sudden halts like tipsy
men, or gliding along like worms, to take sanctuary here; and we sleep
all jumbled together in the common grave.

* * * * *

Waking, Paradis and I look at each other, and remember. We return to
life and daylight as in a nightmare. In front of us the calamitous
plain is resurrected, where hummocks vaguely appear from their
immersion, the steel-like plain that is rusty in places and shines with
lines and pools of water, while bodies are strewn here and there in the
vastness like foul rubbish, prone bodies that breathe or rot.

Paradis says to me, "That's war."

"Yes, that's it," he repeats in a far-away voice, "that's war. It's not
anything else."

He means--and I am with him in his meaning--"More than attacks that are
like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like
banners, more even than the hand-to-hand encounters of shouting strife,
War is frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud
and dung and infamous filth. It is befo