the others. He swam upon the stream, while the others, weighed down by
the burden of their riper humanity, sank like heavy clods. Here other
laws obtained. The dark shaft in which they now reeled forward with
trembling knees led to an island washed by a sea of death. Whoever was
stranded there dared not keep anything that he used in another world.
The man who was master here was the one who had kept nothing but his axe
and his fist. And he was the rich one upon whose superabundance the
others depended. As Captain Marschner groped his way through the
slippery trench in a daze, it became clearer and clearer to him that he
must now hold on to his detested lieutenant like a treasure. Without him
he would be lost.

He saw the traces of puddles of blood at his feet, and trod upon
tattered, blood-soaked pieces of uniforms, on empty shells, rattling
preserve tins, fragments of cannon balls. Yawning shell holes would open
up suddenly, precariously bridged with half-charred boards.

Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains
of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder that
took one's breath away and made one dizzy--all steeped in the
suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent,
stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. Wherever one stepped the earth
had been lacerated by gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again,
once more ripped open to its very bowels, and leveled a second time, so
that one reeled on unconscious, as if in a hurricane.

Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept
through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more
passionately, ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler. Weixler alone
could help him or take his place, with that grim, cold energy of his,