Bodily, the house collapsed behind me.

In my flight over the shifting ground I was brushed by the mass of maddened falling stones and the cry of the ruins, sinking in vast dust-clouds as in a tumult of beating wings.
A veritable squall of shells was falling in this corner of the village.
A little way off some soldiers were ejaculating in front of a little house which had just been broken in two.

They did not go close to it because of the terrible whistling which was burying itself here and there all around, and the splinters that riddled it at every blow.
Within the shelter of a wall we watched it appear under a vault of smoke, in the vivid flashes of that unnatural tempest.
"Why, you're covered with blood!" a comrade said to me, disquieted.
Stupefied and still thunderstruck I looked at that house's bones and broken spine, that human house.
It had been split from top to bottom and all the front was down.

In a single second one saw all the seared cellules of its rooms, the geometric path of the flues, and a down quilt like viscera on the skeleton of a bed.

In the upper story an overhanging floor remained, and there we saw the bodies of two officers, pierced and spiked to their places round the table where they were lunching when the lightning fell--a nice lunch, too, for we saw plates and glasses and a bottle of champagne.
"It's Lieutenant Norbert and Lieutenant Ferriere." One of these specters was standing, and with cloven jaws so enlarged that his head was half open, he was smiling.