Book Description

On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, as still as those poordead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests which the quick were wont insensately to wagefor a few charnel yards of that debatable ground.Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached with the misery ofhunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was unharmed.Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable an undetected escapethrough the German lines, he had been in the open, alternately creeping toward the Britishtrenches under cover of darkness and resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while pistol-lights and star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with ghastly glareand disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard ribbon of earth, littered withindescribable abominations, which set apart the combatants. When this happened, theliving had no other choice than to ape the dead, lest the least movement, detected by eyesthat peered without rest through loopholes in the sandbag parapets, invite a bullet's blow.Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even as rifle-fire had grownmore intermittent ... as if many waters might quench out hate in the heart of man!For it was raining hard-a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy atmospherewhose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and inexorable incubus; itsincessant crepitation resembling the mutter of a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing toinsignificance the stuttering of machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even adull thunder of cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast andshimmering curtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenches andover all that weary land. Thus had it rained since noon, and thus-for want of any hint ofslackening-it might rain for another twelve hours, or eighteen, or twenty-four....The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled and winked out inmid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtained while, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap in the British barbed-wire entanglements which he hadmarked down ere daylight waned, shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequentdetours to avoid the unspeakab