Then our captain's voice rings out again, "Fire!" ... the volley crashes, and behold! not a man is hit ... they all are standing there unscathed ... they have fired into the air ... and with shouts of joy the ranks dissolve ... they rush toward one another ... the rifles fall to the ground ... but they rush into one another's arms, and fondle one another, and laugh aloud as children laugh ... then they fall back into line ... they shoulder their rifles ... right about turn!... the bands strike up a joyous march, they march off with bands playing--every regiment to its own home.... And now I catch myself singing an accompaniment to it aloud.... I am beating time with my right hand, and supporting myself on my seat with my left ... and something trickles oddly across my hand--something like warm water.... I raise my hand to my eyes ... it is red and moist ... blood is flowing over my white hand ... then I realize it, the white thing under me is not a heap of sand.... I have been sitting on a corpse ... horror-stricken, I rush about ... and one is lying over there, too ... and there, and there!... Merciful God! I see it plainly now; there are only dead to-night ... the human race died out this very night ... I am the last survivor ... the fields are dead--the woods dead--the villages dead--the cities dead--the Earth is dead--the Earth was butchered to-night, and I, only I have escaped the slaughter-house. And it comes over me as a great thing, a pathetically great thing--now I know what my destiny is--lowering, I watch my own actions, and wait to see how I shall accomplish it--I mark how I am slowly putting my hand into my pocket--before I left home I took my pocket-pistol with me. I am holding the toy in my hand--the steel is looking up at me and blinking at me--I am gazing with a smile into its black, confiding muzzle--I am holding it against my temples--I pull the trigger, and fall over backward--the last of mankind on this dead earth! EPILOGUE WE POOR DEAD They have now covered up our hot breath with earth. Why are you blinking at me with your bleared eyes, my brother? Are you not glad? Don't they envy us our sweet death? They have laid us out in a picturesque row, and you need only turn your head to rub against human flesh at once, and if you turn your yellow eyeball, you can see nothing but corpses in the twilight. One beside the other, that is how they are sleeping. And corpse upon corpse, ever more of them, through the whole length of the loose soil of the potato-field, and we even fill the whole adjoining field of roots. Wonder whether the sun still goes on shining above us?--whether they still know how to laugh in the towns as we used to in our time? Wonder whether my wife still goes on remembering her dead husband--and my two kiddies--whether they have already forgotten their father? They were so tiny at the time--another man'll come along--they will call another fellow father--and my wife is still so young and fair.