But her conductor had smiled. "They shall be called the
brothers and the sisters of the Lord," he had said. "Mademoiselle is
brave for her Brothers' sake." He was a priest. There were many priests
among the stretcher-bearers.
Crouching close to the ground, behind the spreading roots of a giant oak,
she raised her eyes. Before her lay a sea of smooth, soft mud nearly a
mile wide. From the centre rose a solitary tree, from which all had been
shot away but two bare branches like outstretched arms above the silence.
Beyond, the hills rose again. There was something unearthly in the
silence that seemed to brood above that sea of mud. The old priest told
her of the living men, French and German, who had stood there day and
night sunk in it up to their waists, screaming hour after hour, and
waving their arms, sinking into it lower and lower, none able to help
them: until at last only their screaming heads were left, and after a
time these, too, would disappear: and the silence come again.
She saw the ditches, like long graves dug for the living, where the
weary, listless men stood knee-deep in mud, hoping for wounds that would
relieve them from the ghastly monotony of their existence; the holes of
muddy water where the dead things lay, to which they crept out in the
night to wash a little of the filth from their clammy bodies and their
stinking clothes; the holes dug out of the mud in which they ate and
slept and lived year after year: till brain and heart and soul seemed to
have died out of them, and they remembered with an effort that they once
were men.
Pages:
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434