The other two lay with their knees drawn
up and their heads between their arms. The naked feet with their grey
convulsed toes stared into the communication trench like things robbed,
with a mute accusal. There was a remoteness about these dead bodies, a
loneliness, an isolation about their bared feet. A tangled web of
memories arose, a throng of fleeting faces glimmered in the captain's
soul--gondoliers of Venice, voluble cabbies, a toothless inn-keeper's
wife at Posilipo. Two trips on a vacation in Italy drove an army of
sorrowing figures through his mind. And finally another figure appeared
in that ghostly dance of death, his own sister, sitting in a concert
hall in Vienna, care-free, listening to music, while her brother lay
somewhere stretched out on the ground, rigid in death, an enemy's corpse
just to be kicked aside.
Shuddering, the captain hastened back down the trench, as though the
three dead men were pursuing him noiselessly on their naked soles. When
he reached his own men at last, he felt as if he had arrived at a harbor
of safety.
The shells were now falling so thick that there was not a moment's pause
between the explosions, and all sounds merged into a single, equal,
rolling thunder, which made the earth tremble like the hull of a ship.
But there was a particularly sharp crashing and splintering from one
shot that hit the trench squarely and whirled the coverings above in all
directions.
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