"I tell you it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war."
We go back.
It is time we returned to the lorries.
The sky is become brighter.
Three o'clock in the morning.
The breeze is fresh and cool, the pale hour makes our faces look grey.
We trudge onward in single file through the trenches and shell-holes and come again to the zone of mist.
Katczinsky is restive, that's a bad sign.
"What's up, Kat?" says Kropp.
"I wish I were back home."
Home—he means the huts.
"We'll soon be out of it, Kat."
He is nervous.
"I don't know, I don't know–––"
We come to the communication-trench and then to the open fields.
The little wood reappears; we know every foot of ground here.
There's the cemetery with the mounds and the black crosses.
That moment it breaks out behind us, swells, roars, and thunders.
We duck down—a cloud of flame shoots up a hundred yards ahead of us.
The next minute under a second explosion part of the wood rises slowly in the air, three or four trees sail up and then crash to pieces.
The shells begin to hiss like safety-valves—heavy fire–––
"Take cover!" yells somebody—"Cover!"
The fields are flat, the wood is too distant and dangerous—the only cover is the graveyard and the mounds.
We stumble across in the dark and as though he had been spat there every man lies glued behind a mound.
Not a moment too soon.
The dark goes mad.
It heaves and raves.
Darknesses blacker than the night rush on us with giant strides, over us and away.
The flames of the explosions light up the graveyard.
There is no escape anywhere.
By the light of the shells I try to get a view of the fields.
They are a surging sea, daggers of flame from the explosions leap up like fountains.
It is impossible for anyone to break through it.
The wood vanishes, it is pounded, crushed, torn to pieces.
We must stay here in the graveyard.
The earth bursts before us.
It rains clods.
I feel a smack.
My sleeve is torn away by a splinter.
I shut my fist.
No pain.
Still that does not reassure me: wounds don't hurt till afterwards.
I feel the arm all over.
It is grazed but sound.
Now a crack on the skull, I begin to lose consciousness.
Like lightning the thought comes to me: Don't faint!
I sink down in the black broth and immediately come up to the top again.
A splinter slashes into my helmet, but has already travelled so far that it does not go through.
I wipe the mud out of my eyes.
A hole is torn up in front of me.