Under the sky, which is dark as with threat of deluge, the explosions throw livid sunshine in all directions.

From one end to the other of the visible world the fields move and descend and dissolve, and the immense expanse stumbles and falls like the sea.

Towering explosions in the east, a squall in the south; in the zenith a file of bursting shrapnel like suspended volcanoes.
The smoke which goes by, and the hours as well, darken the inferno.
Two or three of us risk our faces at the earthen cleft and look out, as much for the purpose of propping ourselves against the earth as for seeing.

But we see nothing, nothing on the infinite expanse which is full of rain and dusk, nothing but the clouds which tear themselves and blend together in the sky, and the clouds which come out of the earth.
Then, in the slanting rain and the limitless gray, we see a man, one only, who advances with his bayonet forward, like a specter.
We watch this shapeless being, this thing, leaving our lines and going away yonder.
We only see one--perhaps that is the shadow of another, on his left.
We do not understand, and then we do.

It is the end of the attacking wave.
What can his thoughts be--this man alone in the rain as if under a curse, who goes upright away, forward, when space is changed into a shrieking machine?
By the light of a cascade of flashes I thought I saw a strange monk-like face.