"

And those words stabbed me to the heart and dilated my eyes with
horror, for it seemed to me suddenly, in a flash, that he understood
what he was saying! A picture comes to life before my eyes--that
prince, whom I saw from below, once upon a time, in the nightmare of
life, he who loved the blood of the chase. Not far away a shell turns
the darkness upside down; and it seems as if that explosion also has
considered and shrieked.

Heavy night is implanted everywhere around us. My hands are bathed in
black blood. On my neck and cheeks, rain, which is also black, bleeds.

The funeral procession of silver-fringed clouds goes by once more, and
again a ray of moonlight besilvers the swamp that has sunk us soldiers;
it lays winding-sheets on the prone.

All at once a swelling lamentation comes to life, one knows not where,
and glides over the plain:--

"Help! Help!"

"Now then! _They're_ not coming to look for us! What about it?"

And I see a stirring and movement, very gentle, as at the bottom of the
sea.

Amid the glut of noises, upon that still tepid and unsubmissive expanse
where cold death sits brooding, that sharp profile has fallen back.
The cloak is quivering. The great and sumptuous bird of prey is in the
act of taking wing.

The horse has not stopped bleeding. Its blood falls on me drop by drop
with the regularity of a clock,--as though all the blood that is
filtering through the strata of the field and all the punishment of the
wounded came to a head in him and through him. Ah, it seems that truth
goes farther in all directions than one thought! We bend over the
wrong that animals suffer, for them we wholly understand.

Men, men! Everywhere the plain has a mangled outline. Below that
horizon, sometimes blue-black and sometimes red-black, the plain is
monumental!

CHAPTER XV

AN APPARITION

I have not changed my place. I open my eyes. Have I been sleeping? I
do not know. There is tranquil light now. It is evening or morning.
My arms alone can tremble. I am enrooted like a distorted bush. My
wound? It is that which glues me to the ground.

I succeed in raising my face, and the wet waves of space assail my
eyes. Patiently I pick out of the earthy pallor which blends all
things some foggy shoulders, some cloudy angles of elbows, some
hand-like lacerations. I discern in the still circle which encloses
me--faces lying on the ground and dirty as feet, faces held out to th