While they hold the sergeant’s hand and question him, he only slavers new heaps of bubbles, and we see his great black-bearded head across this rosy cloud.  Laid out like that, he might be a deep-breathing marine monster, and the transparent red foam gathers and creeps up to his great hazy eyes, no longer spectacled.

Then his throat rattles.  It is a childish rattle, and he dies moving his head to right and to left as though he were trying very gently to say “No.”

Looking on the enormous inert mass, I reflect that he was a good man.  He had an innocent and impressionable heart.  How I reproach myself that I sometimes abused him for the ingenuous narrowness of his views, and for a certain clerical impertinence that he always had!  And how glad I am in this distressing scene—­yes, happy enough to tremble with joy—­that I restrained myself from an angry protest when I found him stealthily reading a letter I was writing, a protest that would unjustly have wounded him!  I remember the time when he exasperated me so much by his dissertation on France and the Virgin Mary.  It seemed impossible to me that he could utter those thoughts sincerely.  Why should he not have been sincere?  Has he not been really killed today?  I remember, too, certain deeds of devotion, the kindly patience of the great man, exiled in war as in life—­and the rest does not matter.  His ideas themselves are only trivial details compared with his heart—­which is there on the ground in ruins in this corner of Hell.  With what intensity I lamented this man who was so far asunder from me in everything!

Then fell the thunder on us!  We were thrown violently on each other by the frightful shaking of the ground and the walls.  It was as if the overhanging earth had burst and hurled itself down.  Part of the armor-plate of beams collapsed, enlarging the hole that already pierced the cavern.  Another shock—­another pulverized span fell in roaring destruction.  The corpse of the great Red Cross sergeant went rolling against the wall like the trunk of a tree.  All the timber in the long frame-work of the cave, those heavy black vertebrae, cracked with an ear-splitting noise, and all the prisoners in the dungeon shouted together in horror.

Blow after blow, the explosions resound and drive us in all directions as the bombardment mangles and devours the sanctuary of pierced and diminished refuge.  As the hissing flight of shells hammers and crushes the gaping end of the cave with its thunderbolts, daylight streams in through the clefts.  More sharply now, and more unnaturally, one sees the flushed faces and those pallid with death, the eyes which fade in agony or burn with fever, the patched-up white-bound bodies, the monstrous bandages.  All that was hidden rises again into daylight.  Haggard, blinking and distorted, in face of the flood of iron and embers that the hurricanes of light bring with them, the wounded arise and scatter and try to take flight.  All the terror-struck inhabitants roll about in compact masses across the miserable tunnel, as if in the pitching hold of a great ship that strikes the rocks.