“The air tore at my ears as I fell, and there was a rushing sound, and the sun reeled in the sky before me, with blood-red bars crossing the yellow of his light. Then the ground seemed to rise up and smite me, and I lay all bruised and broken from my fall. I felt the blood burst out in warm gouts in breathing, and I said, ‘I am broken to pieces. I am dying. Soon I shall be dead.’ And then I became aware of a voice speaking to me, as if through grey clouds that were around me. ‘Lie still,’ said the voice, ‘and they will think us dead like the others, and by this we may escape; lie still.’
“I knew then I was not dead but broken, and I dreaded moving because of the sickening sense of the red stream that welled from my open lips.
“Only my spirit was kept from fainting by the sound of that voice. ‘Life,’ it whispered; ‘we are not dead. Life.’
“And surely for hours the bodies fell from a height around us, and I lay listening to the sound. And when at last that sound was finished, they brought carts to take us away. I was thrown in among the dead bodies--taken up and thrown in, like any refuse that must be carted away. My dears, this happened long ago; this happened--God knows it was no dream. And I lay in that earth with the dead around me, the dead already cold. Eyes glazed and open, lay near me, and hands with the fingers stiff upon them, thrust out against my face. Flung in they were, these dead bodies. Is there anything worse than to be alive among the dead?
“So I lay under this load of corpses, now straining my head to get a crevice to breathe through, now striving to rid myself of some cold body lying on my face.
“At last the carts started. Slowly they were driven from the town. Through a long night journey we travelled till we came to a stand. I heard the men come round, and release the pins that hold a cart steady, and when these were loosened, the heap of corpses was shot out upon the ground.
“Once more upon the earth I lay with the dead around me, and I saw the carts making their slow journey returning to the town. The wheels sounded more and more distantly, till at last all was still.
“And the sky changed from grey dusk to the flush of dawn, then a long streak of red, and I lay watching it. And in that dawn my companion and I, rose up from among the dead bodies, and took our way across the plain.