VII
After the red round eye of the sun had stared long at the little plain
and its burden, darkness, a sable mercy, came heavily upon it, and the
wan hands of the dead were no longer seen in strange frozen gestures.
The heights in front of the plain shone with tiny camp-fires, and from
the town in the rear, small shimmerings ascended from the blazes of the
bivouac. The plain was a black expanse upon which, from time to time,
dots of light, lanterns, floated slowly here and there. These fields
were long steeped in grim mystery.
Suddenly, upon one dark spot, there was a resurrection. A strange thing
had been groaning there, prostrate. Then it suddenly dragged itself to a
sitting posture, and became a man.
The man stared stupidly for a moment at the lights on the hill, then
turned and contemplated the faint colouring over the town. For some
moments he remained thus, staring with dull eyes, his face unemotional,
wooden.
Finally he looked around him at the corpses dimly to be seen. No change
flashed into his face upon viewing these men. They seemed to suggest
merely that his information concerning himself was not too complete. He
ran his fingers over his arms and chest, bearing always the air of an
idiot upon a bench at an almshouse door.
Finding no wound in his arms nor in his chest, he raised his hand to
his head, and the fingers came away with some dark liquid upon them.
Holding these fingers close to his eyes, he scanned them in the same
stupid fashion, while his body gently swayed.
The soldier rolled his eyes again toward the town. When he arose, his
clothing peeled from the frozen ground like wet paper. Hearing the sound
of it, he seemed to see reason for deliberation. He paused and looked at
the ground, then at his trousers, then at the ground.
Finally he went slowly off toward the faint reflection, holding his
hands palm outward before him, and walking in the manner of a blind man.
