Yawning shell holes would open
up suddenly, precariously bridged with half-charred boards.
Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains
of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder that
took one's breath away and made one dizzy--all steeped in the
suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent,
stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. Wherever one stepped the earth
had been lacerated by gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again,
once more ripped open to its very bowels, and leveled a second time, so
that one reeled on unconscious, as if in a hurricane.
Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept
through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more
passionately, ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler. Weixler alone
could help him or take his place, with that grim, cold energy of his,
with that blindness to everything which did not touch his own life, or
which was eclipsed by the glowing vision of an Erich Weixler studded
with decorations and promoted out of his turn. The captain kept looking
about for him anxiously, and breathed with relief each time the urgent,
rasping voice came to his ears from the rear.
The trench seemed never to be coming to an end. Marschner felt his
strength giving way. He stumbled more frequently and closed his eyes
with a shudder at the criss-cross traces of blood that precisely
indicated the path of the wounded.
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