Now I've got thirty-one, eleven of them wounded so that
they can't hold a rifle. Thirty-one fellows to hold the trench with!
Last night there were still forty-five of us when they attacked. We
drove 'em to hell, of course, but fourteen of our men went again. We
haven't had a chance to bury them yet. Didn't you see them lying out
there?"
The Captain let him talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table,
held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered
about the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little
kerosene lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected
telephone at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a
crumpled map was spread out. He saw a mountain of rifles, bundles of
uniforms, each one ticketed. And he felt how inch by inch, a dumb, icy
horror arose within him and paralyzed his breathing, as though the earth
overhead, upheld by only a thin scaffolding of cracked boards and
threatening to fall at any moment, had already laid its intolerable
weight upon his chest. And that prancing ghost, that giggling death's
head, which only a week before perhaps had still been young, affected
him like a nightmare. And the thought that now his turn had come to
stick it out in that sepulchral vault for five or six days or a week and
experience the same horrors that the man there was telling about with a
laugh intensified his discouragement into a passionate, throbbing
indignation which he could scarcely control any more.
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