e.
A little way off some soldiers were ejaculating in front of a little
house which had just been broken in two. They did not go close to it
because of the terrible whistling which was burying itself here and
there all around, and the splinters that riddled it at every blow.
Within the shelter of a wall we watched it appear under a vault of
smoke, in the vivid flashes of that unnatural tempest.

"Why, you're covered with blood!" a comrade said to me, disquieted.

Stupefied and still thunderstruck I looked at that house's bones and
broken spine, that human house.

It had been split from top to bottom and all the front was down. In a
single second one saw all the seared cellules of its rooms, the
geometric path of the flues, and a down quilt like viscera on the
skeleton of a bed. In the upper story an overhanging floor remained,
and there we saw the bodies of two officers, pierced and spiked to
their places round the table where they were lunching when the
lightning fell--a nice lunch, too, for we saw plates and glasses and a
bottle of champagne.

"It's Lieutenant Norbert and Lieutenant Ferriere."

One of these specters was standing, and with cloven jaws so enlarged
that his head was half open, he was smiling. One arm was raised aloft
in the festive gesture which he had begun forever. The other, his fine
fair hair untouched, was seated with his elbows on a cloth now red as a
Turkey carpet, hideously attentive, his face besmeared with shining
blood and full of foul marks. They seemed like two statues of youth
and the joy of life framed in horror.

"There's three!" some one shouted.

This one, whom we had not seen at first, hung in the air with dangling
arms against the sheer wall, hooked on to a beam by the bottom of his
trousers. A pool of blood which lengthened down the flat plaster
looked like a projected shadow. At each fresh explosion splinters were
scattered round him and shook him, as though the dead man was still
marked and chosen by the blind destruction.

There was something hatefully painful in the doll-like attitude of the
hanging corpse.

Then Termite's voice was raised. "Poor lad!" he said.

He went out from the shelter of the wall.

"Are you mad?" we shouted; "he's dead, anyway!"

A ladder was there. Termite seized it and dragged it towards the
disemboweled house, which was lashed every minute by broadsides of
splinters.

"Termite!" cried the lieutenant, "I forbid you to go there!