22/27 The fumes, the gases, the shock, the fire, what they had endured and what they had escaped--all these had distracted them. They danced, sang, wept, laughed, shouted in a sort of maudlin frenzy, spun about deliriously until they dropped. They were deafened, and some of them could not see but had to grope their way. I remember one man who sat down and pulled off his boots and socks and threw them away and then hobbled on in his bare feet until he cut the bottoms of them to pieces. I don't care to see anything like that again--even if it is my enemies that suffer it." He told it so vividly, that standing alongside of him before the tunnel opening I could see the procession myself--those two hundred men who had drained horror to its lees and were drunk on it. |