Grandad! Grandad!

Youfor got! Your! Ho-orse!

and then immediately afterwards, two notes higher:

Grandad! Grandad!

like a suppliant and clownish invocation, an ironic and clownish reproach, or reminder, or warning, or something, probably nothing, except the meaningless words, the light, carefree notes in tireless repetition, time somehow motionless too, like a kind of mud, of mire, stagnant as though caught under the weight of the suffocating lid of stench exhaled from thousands and thousands of men stagnating in their own abjection, excluded from the world of the living but not yet in the world of the dead: between the two, so to speak, dragging like ironic stigmata their absurd debris of uniforms that made them look like a race of ghosts, of souls left on account, that is, forgotten, or rejected, or refused, or vomited up, both by death and by life, as if neither one nor the other had wanted them, so that they seemed now to be moving not in time but in a kind of greyish glue without dimensions, a glue of nothingness, of uncertain duration sporadically pierced by the nostalgic, gay and stubborn repetition of the same refrain, the same meaningless, melancholy words:

Grandad! Grandad!

Youfor got! Your! Ho-orse!

Grandad! Grandad!