What was it? Such a frightful thing as that even this field, this
waiting-room to the Beyond, had never witnessed before. Even the awful
recollection of another wounded man who had stood at this same spot a
few days before, his hands looking as though they were modeling
something, while in actuality they were carefully holding his own
entrails--even that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this
Janus head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all
distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish hatred on the other side.

"Shrapnel?" I stammered timidly.

The answer was confused. All I could get out of it was that a dumdum
bullet had smashed his right shinbone. But what was that he kept
mumbling about a hook each time his hand trembled up to his glowing
cheek?

I could not understand him; for the thing he had gone through still
seethed in his veins so violently that he spoke as though it were just
then happening and I were witnessing it. His peasant's mind could not
comprehend that there were people who had not seen or heard of the
tremendous misery of the last hours he had gone through. So it was more
by guess-work that I gradually pieced together his story from unfinished
sentences, coarse oaths, and groans.

For a whole night, after a repulsed attack on the enemy's trench, he had
lain with a broken leg, unconscious, near our own wire entanglements. At
dawn they threw out the iron grappling hook for him, with which they
pull over into the trench the corpses of friend and foe so as to be able
to bury them unceremoniously before the sun of Goerz has a chance to do
its work. With this hook, dipped in hundreds of corpses, a dunce--"God