Part 13

An ochre cannon-ball lay suspended in the soft blue sky. Efflorescent clouds, like fresh chrysanthemums, were piled high atop one another, their tips transuded with golden beams. The sky was divided into slices of faint pink, purple, and orange.

On the drab earth, beaten lifeless by carnage and corruption, drab bodies lay, oozing thin streams of pink blood, which formed dark, mysterious little pools by their sides. Jaws were slack—dark, objectionable caverns in pallid faces. Some men still moaned, or, in a tone into which discouragement had crept, called for help.

Each body was alone, drawn apart from its companions by its separate and incommunicable misery. The bodies would remain alone until to-morrow or the day after to-morrow, when they would be furnishing a festival for the bugs which now only inquisitively inspected them.

In the still air the scrubby bushes rose stiff and unyielding, antipathetic to the prostrate bodies which were linked to them by the magic of color. The farmhouse on the gray ridge was a gay-capped sepulchre.

Hicks tramped on through the field, dimly sensing the dead, the odors, the scene. He found his rifle where he had thrown it. As he picked it up, the ridge swarmed with small gray figures, ever growing nearer. He turned and walked toward his platoon. The breath from his nostrils felt cool. He raised his chin a little. The action seemed to draw his feet from the earth. No longer did anything matter, neither the bayonets, the bullets, the barbed wire, the dead, nor the living. The soul of Hicks was numb.