The companies have fallen in. The officers have assembled, and are pow-wowing. We seem to have lost touch. The sergeant beside me is swearing up his sleeve, and is cursing at something about lunacy and blindman's buff. I am gazing up meditatively at the heights, overgrown with trees and undergrowth, and am thinking what fun it would be if we were to have to make our way back to the defile now, and in the thick of it the enemy were to break in on us right and left--no man would come out of it alive--the battle of the Teutoburger Forest recurs to me--I am trying to, make out if they are oaks or beeches over there----Of a sudden there is a flash of lightning from the undergrowth; the very firmament cracks and sways as if it were going to fall in on us.... "Lie down!" Horror screams somewhere or other. And trembling, we lie down ... and over our heads rushes something that howls for our flesh.... What's the next thing? Up and at them now! Rush straight at the guns. Suffocate their fiery mouths with our flesh and bones. "Up! Get up!" The captain comes up to us at a run. The breath of the iron holds us tight pressed to the ground as if in a vice.... Turn your head away. Now! Now! Then--A-a-h! The vault of Heaven has cracked above us, and has spurted down on to the sand from above. Life is lying there, wriggling on the earth, and the hands that were clawing the ground are now clutching idly at the shattered air. I rise to my feet again.... I have not been hit. But the man who leaped up beside me--he is lying flat in the sand and screaming in a broken voice. He is lying as if he had been nailed firmly through his stomach to the earth, and as if he could not get free again. The body itself is dead, only the arms and legs are still alive. And arms and legs are working wildly through the air. "Up! Get up! Quick march!" a voice yells in our ears. We no longer know who it is shouting to us, and we don't know from what quarter they have called us.... We leap to our feet. We leave the captain and the wounded in their blood; we start up and run away, and are running a race with the shells, for we are running for our bare, naked life. But the shells have the legs of us. They catch us up from behind in our backs, and wherever the invisible sheaf plunges hissing down, men are falling with it and rolling, helter-skelter in their blood. But we speed away over twitching and dismembered bodies, and over bodies turning somersaults, and look neither to the right nor to the left. We are on the run, and shrink into ourselves as we run. We draw our necks deep between our shoulders, for every man feels that the next moment his head will be leaping out from between his shoulder-blades from behind.