about holding on to his injured leg and tossing his head from one
shoulder to the other.

Towards noon I sent my corporals in search of a vehicle, promising them
a princely reward, while I ran to the field again with my whisky flask.

He was no longer dancing about. He was kneeling in the center of the
circle of wounded men, his body bent over, rolling his head on the
ground as though it were a thing apart from himself. Suddenly he jumped
up with such a yell of fury that a frightened murmur came even from the
line of wounded men, who had been sitting there indifferent, sunk in
their own suffering.

That was no longer anything human. The man's skin could not stand any
more stretching and had burst. The broad splits ran apart like the lines
of a compass and in the middle the raw flesh glowed and gushed out.

And he yelled! He hammered with his fist on the enormous purplish lump,
until he fell to his knees again moaning under the blows of his own
hand.

It was dark already when--at last!--they came and carted him away. And
when the night slowly wove its web of mist in the woods and I lay
wrapped in a mound of blankets, the only one who was still awake in the
throng of black tree-trunks that moved closer together in the darkness--
there he was back again, standing up stiff in the moonlight, his
tortured cheek, huge as a pumpkin, shining blue against the black
shadows of the trees. It glimmered like a will-o'-the-wisp, now here,
now there. Night after night. It shone into every dream, so that I
forced my eyelids open with my fingers--until, after ten frightful