I know that I cried out, hiccoughing. Assaulted by the horrible kiss and by the vile clasp that bruised the hand I had offered to the woman's beauty--a hand still outheld--sunk in whirling smoke and ashes and the dreadful noise now majestically ebbing, I found my way out of the place, between walls that reeled as I did. Bodily, the house collapsed behind me. In my flight over the shifting ground I was brushed by the mass of maddened falling stones and the cry of the ruins, sinking in vast dust-clouds as in a tumult of beating wings.
A veritable squall of shells was falling in this corner of the village. A little way off some soldiers were ejaculating in front of a little house which had just been broken in two. They did not go close to it because of the terrible whistling which was burying itself here and there all around, and the splinters that riddled it at every blow. Within the shelter of a wall we watched it appear under a vault of smoke, in the vivid flashes of that unnatural tempest.
"Why, you're covered with blood!" a comrade said to me, disquieted.
Stupefied and still thunderstruck I looked at that house's bones and broken spine, that human house.
It had been split from top to bottom and all the front was down. In a single second one saw all the seared cellules of its rooms, the geometric path of the flues, and a down quilt like viscera on the skeleton of a bed. In the upper story an overhanging floor remained, and there we saw the bodies of two officers, pierced and spiked to their places round the table where they were lunching when the lightning fell--a nice lunch, too, for we saw plates and glasses and a bottle of champagne.
"It's Lieutenant Norbert and Lieutenant Ferrière."
One of these specters was standing, and with cloven jaws so enlarged that his head was half open, he was smiling. One arm was raised aloft in the festive gesture which he had begun forever. The other, his fine fair hair untouched, was seated with his elbows on a cloth now red as a Turkey carpet, hideously attentive, his face besmeared with shining blood and full of foul marks. They seemed like two statues of youth and the joy of life framed in horror.
This one, whom we had not seen at first, hung in the air with dangling arms against the sheer wall, hooked on to a beam by the bottom of his trousers. A pool of blood which lengthened down the flat plaster looked like a projected shadow. At each fresh explosion splinters were scattered round him and shook him, as though the dead man was still marked and chosen by the blind destruction.