I go farther away, towards the point where the light from outside comes through among the tangled beams as through a broken grating, and stride over the interminable stretchers that take up all the width of the underground alley whose oppressive confinement chokes me.  The human forms prone on the stretchers are now hardly stirring under the Jack-o’-lanterns of the candles; they stagnate in their rattling breath and heavy groans.

On the edge of a stretcher a man is sitting, leaning against the wall.  His clothes are torn apart, and in the middle of their darkness appears the white, emaciated breast of a martyr.  His head is bent quite back and veiled in shadow, but I can see the beating of his heart.

The daylight that is trickling through at the end, drop by drop, comes in by an earth-fall.  Several shells. falling on the same spot, have broken through the heavy earthen roof of the Refuge.

Here, some pale reflections are cast on the blue of the greatcoats, on the shoulders and along the folds.  Almost paralyzed by the darkness and their own weakness, a group of men is pressing towards the gap, like dead men half awaking, to taste a little of the pallid air and detach themselves from the sepulcher.  This corner at the extremity of the gloom offers itself as a way of escape, an oasis where one may stand upright, where one is lightly, angelically touched by the light of heaven.

“There were some chaps there that were blown to bits when the shells burst,” said some one to me who was waiting there in the sickly ray of entombed light.  “You talk about a mess!  Look, there’s the padre hooking down what was blown up.”

The huge Red Cross sergeant, in a hunter’s chestnut waistcoat which gives him the chest of a gorilla, is detaching the pendent entrails twisted among the beams of the shattered woodwork.  For the purpose he is using a rifle with fixed bayonet, since he could not find a stick long enough; and the heavy giant, bald, bearded and asthmatic, wields the weapon awkwardly.  He has a mild face, meek and unhappy, and while he tries to catch the remains of intestines in the corners, he mutters a string of “Oh’s!” like sighs.  His eyes are masked by blue glasses; his breathing is noisy.  The top of his head is of puny dimensions, and the huge thickness of his neck has a conical shape.  To see him thus pricking and unhanging from the air strips of viscera and rags of flesh, you could take him for a butcher at some fiendish task.

But I let myself fall in a corner with my eyes half closed, seeing hardly anything of the spectacle that lies and palpitates and falls around me.  Indistinctly I gather some fragments of sentences—­still the horrible monotony of the story of wounds:  “Nom de Dieu!  In that place I should think the bullets were touching each other.—­“His head was bored through from one temple to the other.  You could have passed a thread through.”

“Those beggars were an hour before they lifted their fire and stopped peppering us.”  Nearer to me some one gabbles at the end of his story, “When I’m sleeping I dream that I’m killing him over again!”