He gave not another look back at Mihaly the humpback, never turned
around once, but quietly went his way and for a long while felt the warm
throat in his hand.

What was a man who lay gasping on the road to him? One man more or less.
In the rhythmic regularity of the marching column, he had passed by
thousands like him, and it had never occurred to his mind, dulled by
weariness, that the grey spots thickly strewn over the fields, the heaps
lining the roadway like piles of dung in the spring, were human beings
struck down by death. He and his comrades had waded in the dead, there
at Kielce, when they made a dash across the fields, and earthy grey
hands rose out of every furrow pawing the air, and trousers drenched in
blood and distorted faces grew out of the ground, as if all the dead
were scrambling from their graves for the Last Judgment. They had
stepped and stumbled over corpses. Once the fat little officer of
reserves, to the great amusement of his company, had gotten deathly sick
at his stomach because he had inadvertently stepped on the chest of a
half-decayed Russian, and the body had given way under him, and he had
scarcely been able to withdraw his foot from the foul hole. John Bogdan
smiled as he recalled the wicked jokes the men had cracked at the
officer's expense, how the officer had gone all white and leaned against
a tree and carried on like a man who has much more than quenched his
thirst.

The road glowed in the mid-day sun. The village clock struck twelve.
From the hill yonder came, like an answer, the deep bellow of the
factory whistle, and a little white cloud rose over the tops of the
trees. Bogdan quickened his pace, running rather than walking, heedless
of the drops of sweat that ran down and tickled his neck. For almost a
year he had breathed nothing but the hospital atmosphere, had smelled