He
could not be deaf to their woe, to that childlike whimpering which stung
his conscience like a bitter reproach. He stamped on the ground
defiantly. Everything in him arose in rebellion against the task that
called him.
Below, the field of battle stretched far out, cheerlessly grey. No tree,
no patch of green. A stony waste--chopped up, crushed, dug inside out,
no sign of life. The communication trenches, which started in the bottom
of the valley and led to the edge of the hill, from which the wire
entanglements projected, looked like fingers spread out to grasp
something and clawed deep into the throttled earth. Marschner looked
round again involuntarily. Behind him the green slope descended steeply
to the little woods in which the baggage had been left. Farther behind
the white highroad gleamed like a river framed in colored meadows. A
short turn--and the greenness vanished! All life succumbed, as though
roared down by the cannons, by the howling and pounding that hammered in
the valley like the pulsating of a colossal fever. Shell hole upon shell
hole yawned down there. From time to time thick, black pillars of earth
leaped up and for moments hid small parts of this desert burned to
ashes, where the cloven stumps of trees, whittled as by pen-knives,
stuck up like a jeering challenge to the impotent imagination, a
challenge to recognize in this field of death and refuse, the landscape
it once had been, before the great madness had swept over it and sown it
with ruins, leaving it like a dancing floor on which two worlds had
fought for a loose woman.
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