vultures, shedding bombs, while our machine guns lashed the leaves with
a hailstorm of shot? Was it out of _this_ piece of woods that three
men had just driven off, healthy, unscathed, gaily waving their caps?
Where was the wall that held us others imprisoned under the cracking
branches? Was there not a door that opened only to let out pale, sunken
cheeks, feverish eyes, or mangled limbs?

The carriage rolled lightly over the field, trampled down brown, and the
one thing missing to make it the perfect picture of a pleasure trip was
the brilliant red of a Baedeker.

Those men were riding back home.

To wife and child, perhaps?

A painful pulling and tugging, as though my eyes were caught to the
carriage wheels. Then my body rebounded--as if torn off--back into
emptiness, and--at that moment, just when my soul was as if ploughed up
by the carriage and laid bare and defenseless by yearning--at that
moment the experience sprang upon me--with one dreadful leap, one single
bite--incurable for the rest of my life.

Unsuspecting, I crossed over to the wounded man upon whom the three had
so unceremoniously turned their backs, as though he did not also belong
to the interesting museum of shell holes that they had come to inspect.
He was cowering near the dirty ragged little Red Cross flag, with his
head between his knees, and did not hear me come up. Behind him lay the
brown spot which stood out from the green still left on the field like a
circus ring. The wounded soldiers who gathered here every morning at
dawn to be driven to the field hospital in the wagons that brought us