With that the grumbling ceases, and several heads are raised. "Here!"
says Lamuse.
"Get into your harness, big 'un, and come with me." Lamuse buckles on
his knapsack, rolls up his blanket, and fetters his pouches. Since his
seizure of unlucky affection was allayed, he has become more melancholy
than before, and although a sort of fatality makes him continually
stouter, he has become engrossed and isolated, and rarely speaks.
In the evening something comes along the trench, rising and falling
according to the lumps and holes in the ground; a shape that seems in
the shadows to be swimming, that outspreads its arms sometimes, as
though appealing for help. It is Lamuse.
He is among us again, covered with mold and mud. He trembles and
streams with sweat, as one who is afraid. His lips stir, and he gasps,
before they can shape a word.
"Well, what is there?" we ask him vainly.
He collapses in a corner among us and prostrates himself. We offer him
wine, and he refuses it with a sign. Then he turns towards me and
beckons me with a movement of his head.
When I am by him he whispers to me, very low, and as if in church, "I
have seen Eudoxie again." He gasps for breath, his chest wheezes, and
with his eyeballs fast fixed upon a nightmare, he says, "She was
putrid."
"It was the place we'd lost," Lamuse went on, "and that the Colonials
took again with the bayonet ten days ago.
"First we made a hole for the sap, and I was in at it, since I was
scooping more than the others I found myself in front. The others were
widening and making solid behind. But behold I find a jumble of beams.
I'd lit on an old trench, caved in, 'vidently; half caved in--there was
some space and room. In the middle of those stumps of wood all mixed
together that I was lifting away one by one from in front of me, there
was something like a big sandbag in height, upright, and something on
the top of it hanging down.
"And behold a plank gives way, and the queer sack falls on me, with its
weight on top. I was pegged down, and the smell of a corpse filled my
throat--on the top of the bundle there was a head, and it was the hair
that I'd seen hanging down.
"You understand, one couldn't see very well; but I recognized the hair
'cause there isn't any other like it in the world, and then the rest of
the face, all stove in and moldy, the neck pulped, and all the lot dead
for a month perhaps. It was Eudoxie, I tell you.
"Yes, it was the woman I could never go near before, you know--that I
only saw a long way off and couldn't ever touch, same as diamonds. She
used to run about everywhere, you know. She used even to wander in the
lines. One day she must have stopped a bullet, and stayed there, dead
and lost, until the chance of this sap.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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