The fire hisses and roars in that army as in water; it is extinguished in human fountains! * * * * * * It seems to me that I am struggling against what I see, while lying and clinging somewhere; and once I even heard supernatural admonitions in my ear, _as if I were somewhere else_.
I am looking for men--for the rescue of speech, of a word.

How many of them I heard, once upon a time! I want one only, now.

I am in the regions where men are earthed up,--a crushed plain under a dizzy sky, which goes by peopled with other stars than those of heaven, and tense with other clouds, and continually lighted from flash to flash by a daylight which is not day.
Nearer, one makes out the human shape of great drifts and hilly fields, many-colored and vaguely floral--the corpse of a section or of a company.

Nearer still, I perceive at my feet the ugliness of skulls.
Yes, I have seen them--wounds as big as men! In this new cess-pool, which fire dyes red by night and the multitude dyes red by day, crows are staggering, drunk.
Yonder, that is the listening-post, keeping watch over the cycles of time.

Five or six captive sentinels are buried there in that cistern's dark, their faces grimacing through the vent-hole, their skull-caps barred with red as with gleams from hell, their mien desperate and ravenous.
When I ask them why they are fighting, they say:-- "To save my country." I am wandering on the other side of the immense fields where the yellow puddles are strewn with black ones (for blood soils even mud), and with thickets of steel, and with trees which are no more than the shadows of themselves; I hear the skeleton of my jaws shiver and chatter.