e
rain like vases, and holding stagnant tears.

Quite near, one face is looking sadly at me, as it lolls to one side.
It is coming out of the bottom of the heap, as a wild animal might.
Its hair falls back like nails. The nose is a triangular hole and a
little of the whiteness of human marble dots it. There are no lips
left, and the two rows of teeth show up like lettering. The cheeks are
sprinkled with moldy traces of beard. This body is only mud and
stones. This face, in front of my own, is only a consummate mirror.

Water-blackened overcoats cover and clothe the whole earth around me.

I gaze, and gaze----

I am frozen by a mass which supports me. My elbow sinks into it. It
is the horse's belly; its rigid leg obliquely bars the narrow circle
from which my eyes cannot escape. Ah, it is dead! It seems to me that
my breast is empty, yet still there is an echo in my heart. What I am
looking for is life.

The distant sky is resonant, and each dull shot comes and pushes my
shoulder. Nearer, some shells are thundering heavily. Though I cannot
see them, I see the tawny reflection that their flame spreads abroad,
and the sudden darkness as well that is hurled by their clouds of
excretion. Other shadows go and come on the ground about me; and then
I hear in the air the plunge of beating wings, and cries so fierce that
I feel them ransack my head.

* * * * * *

Death is not yet dead everywhere. Some points and surfaces still
resist and budge and cry out, doubtless because it is dawn; and once
the wind swept away a muffled bugle-call. There are some who still
burn with the invisible fire of fever, in spite of the frozen periods
they have crossed. But the cold is working into them. The immobility
of lifeless things is passing into them, and the wind empties itself as
it goes by.

Voices are worn away; looks are soldered to their eyes. Wounds are
staunched; they have finished. Only the earth and the stones bleed.
And just then I saw, under the trickling morning, some half-open but
still tepid dead that steamed, as if they were the blackening
rubbish-heap of a village. I watch that hovering dead breath of the
dead. The crows are eddying round the naked flesh with their flapping
banners and their war-cries. I see one which has found some shining
rubies on the black vein-stone of a foot; and one which noisily draws
near to a mouth, as if called by it. Sometimes a dea