We camp again. My legs don’t want to bend as I lay myself on the ground, observe the droll spectacle around me. Dry voiceless laughs are shoved out of my trap with each contraction of my diaphragm; it’s an interesting feeling.

They’re all paralyzed. I see, on every face, blankness, just blankness. That blankness is on every face now.

“Little mice, little mice,

Even cats have got their lice,

Run-run, run get away—”

“Dead as cinders, grey as ashes,

Cold as ice, now its eye flashes,

Too too late to get away—”

That’s not Thrushchurl but one of the privates, drooping on a flat rock right by me. His face, a moment ago inert, cracks open with a fierce, berserk energy. He leaps up again, slapping his canteen, rapping it smartly each blow quick on the last, and he gives a short laugh with a schoolboyish gaiety his eyes seem only barely able to contain, and I know he’s gone crazy.

Now Thrushchurl is beside me after all, perhaps he sang or perhaps his appearance behind me ...

He sits, light streaming past his face turns it half to ether. Puddles everywhere. Aren’t I good at describing things? Thrushchurl stares at them, like the mercury he enjoys playing with, and they are bright and shiny enough to be mercury. It doesn’t take long to see reflected in them things that aren’t occurring outside of them. In them I see four or five identical objects fixed in a motionless row high in the sky above us. They’re like the white squares of a box kite.

The crazed soldier comes back and sits again. He’s making note of something on an official form like an old rag. I can tell he’s not writing the sort of thing they’re intended for; he finishes his statement, and, trying to insert the nib of this pen into the cap, his eyes gleam, and he deliberately jabs the nib into his left hand, in the flesh between the index and thumb below the joint, his teeth set in a grinding smile like a slot. Blood spurts across his right hand as he pulls out the nib and drives it deeper into the wound, pulls it out and dumbly thrusts it in again, then watches the blood, turning his dripping hand this way and that, smiling fiercely.

It’s dusk, when lights and darkness seem to form small scurrying shapes ... lie down certain a sticklike dwarf with a long thin knife will bound up, perch on my back and stab and stab. At the edge of the clearing beyond my bleeding friend, I see a black hare observing us, half in shadow—the shadow darkens, and it disappears. No one else saw it.

*