The ghost mass was vital with movement, there was indeed a low decrepitation in the spaces above us, and an incessant arrowy flight of forms, or veils of forms, where, too, faces shone, half traceable in features, half blurred, as in a sheen that erased them, as soon as seen. And those faces! They were not the presentiments of color and shade and shadow, perhaps, as a pictorial fact. No, not that--they were evocative lights, that created in my mind's eye, an image as it were, of a living face, and they were most solemn, most sad; in them dwelt an irretrievable impress of desolation. A wave of gloom overwhelmed me. The ground beneath me seemed sinking, I caught Gabrielle to my breast, and, as if in an engulfing swarm of myriads and myriads of stars, I fell to the ground.
The day had again risen, and our neighborhoods still showed the recumbent acres of motionless figures--we had moved on far to the north and westward--the huge aggregations had here drawn together and the trench lines of the hostile armies were scarcely three hundred metres apart. In the French and in the German battalions that indescribable unrest of FEAR that Quintado had predicted was now easily detected. This opened up a more singular and a deeply interesting panorama. By ones and twos, by hundreds and by thousands, slowly, slowly, the immense leaven of repentance of the unsearchable agony of a mingled moral and physical pain, was lifting them from the first stupor, and we could see the figures struggling to their feet, we could see their dazed, horrified, and distorted features, their exchanges of questioning glances, almost as if in their friends, they saw their foes. Nothing more utterly diableresque could be imagined.
Over ourselves had now been developed a great change of feeling. It was the second day of the miraculous intervention, and we had become imbued with the meaning of the miracle. It meant the End of the War, and it meant too a startling Enlightenment. The nations should put an end to their insane rivalries. The era of a divine economy and brotherhood was about to dawn upon the puerile egotism of the world. A new insight deep and revolutionary would adapt the coming centuries to new ends. So an exultation born of this divination urged us to watch and record the accuracy of the prediction. We became neutralized in sympathy by reason of an exorbitant curiosity, and from camp to camp, turning now to the enemy and now to the friend, we pursued our way, that monstrous and wonderful day. The dramatic intensity of it--albeit not a word was spoken in those marshalled millions--surpasses relation. At one moment we watched a group of Germans starting to their feet with consternation in their faces, their arms waving in protest, their features wearing a hundred expressions, terror, maddened wonder, abject subjection, grimness, a mixed commotion of tempers that rolled their eyes, and jerked their lips, and contorted their limbs. And then these initial emotions succumbed to the overpowering sense of torment, and on that followed their convulsive efforts to rise and flee. And their flight was impossible; their feet stuck to the earth, where they stood, and their most violent efforts tumbled them headlong to the ground, and thus quivering into quietness, like the palpitations of a dying animal, they lay motionless.