When my sight was sufficiently habituated to the scene, I perceived some soldiers coming to life out of the eternal night, and by a single effort standing up. The dead horses revived like the dead cavaliers, and the latter remounted them. As soon as two or three thousand men had returned to life, I saw them form unconsciously in line of battle. The two armies took their places fronting one another, and began to fight desperately with a fury that one might have taken for despair. As the combat deepened on both sides, the soldiers came to life more rapidly.... At each gap made by the cannon in the serried ranks a group of resuscitated dead filled up the gaps immediately. When the belligerents had spent the whole day in tearing one another to pieces with grape-shot, with cannons and bullets, with bayonets, sabers and swords--when the great battle was over, there was not a single person killed, no one was even wounded; even uniforms that before it were torn and in disorder were in good condition, the men were safe and sound, and the ranks in correct form. The two armies slowly withdrew from one another, as if the heat of the battle and all its fury had no other object than the restoration to life, amid the smoke of the combat, of the two hundred thousand corpses which had lain on the field a few hours before. What an exemplary and desirable battle it was! Another literary curiosity on the same theme is “Ignis” by Comte Didier de Chousy. This tells of certain engineers who attempted to utilize the internal heat of the earth by running the waters of a lake into a deep boring. The result was an explosion that blew off a piece of the planet. But the passengers on this artificial asteroid on looking down through their well at the earth they had left could see the lake and city undisturbed and watch themselves at work as they were before the place blew up. The explanation was that this fragment of the earth was projected into space more rapidly than the speed of light and so was catching up with the rays that had gone out before the explosion; these rays, of course, carried the picture of earlier scenes. But Einstein would say that this story--as we might ourselves have suspected--must be fiction for according to his theory the speed of light is the absolute limit of motion, the infinity of velocity, which no material body may excel or attain. He does not, however, say anything about the possible speed of a disembodied spirit such as Flammarion employed in his imaginary exploration of space. THE METAPHYSICS OF THE MOVIES