He lay still, very still. Several soldiers were poking around in the tangled debris of bodies and blood and torn brush. It was so still all at once. No sounds at all except the hard breathing of men. No wings threshing, or screams penetrating. Danton played dead. He was surprised at how easy it was. He recognized the officer's voice. "Load everything that looks human in a couple of amtracs and drag them to the disposal mart." "Yes, sir." Motors idling. Men lifting and grunting and cursing. Danton opened his eyes just a little, stared upward into the broad river of sky far up between the mountains: "How many casualties?" "Not bad. We lost a quarter maybe. We probably burned down a thousand Redbirds." "Where do they all come from? We'll never kill them all. They keep coming and they'll always keep coming." "They're supposed to come from across the white desert. We'll never find out. Anyone striking out across that desert never comes back." The officer. "On the double, men!" "Why does it go on?" "Who knows?" "Will we win?" "No one can win. The Redbirds will keep coming. We keep killing!" "The Powers are happy though. Fifty bodies to the marts. Counting yesterday's casualties, that's over three hundred to the marts since this battle started." "And how many since the war started?" "Who knows? When wasn't there a war, pal? What the hell would a guy do around here if there wasn't a war on?" Danton felt hands on his ankles and wrists. He forced limpness down his body and felt himself tossed among the dead. He was hardly noticed at all, dead or otherwise. His uniform was torn, covered with blood and dirt until it looked like any other uniform. He must look pretty bad to be taken for dead. Swarms of insects, drawn by the blood, settled in clouds. The amtrac jerked forward. Danton saw the drivers sitting up there like gray plaster figurines. One of the men started to mumble a song, a kind of chant, more like a dirge. "Shut up! You'll get us shot!" "Borkan's back there. He can't hear." Danton listened. His stomach went hollow and icy at the song. It was old. It was full of ghosts, ghost treads, and ghost shadows marching out of the past, out of the present. "The men of the tattered battalion, which fights 'till it stumbles and dies, Dazed with the scream of the battle, the din and damned glare and the cries, The men with the broken heads backward, and the blood running out of their eyes!" "Shut up!" "The Powers have all of the music, the glory and color and gold; Ours be a handful of ashes, a bountiful mouthful of mould." "Shut up, I tell you! We'll be shot! If you--" "Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold--" The song faded slowly, died out. It seemed to die of weariness, to run down. And Danton kept on hearing it--circling mournfully through his head like swirling muddy water round a stake.