ch I could give you no idea if I talked till to-morrow. The little
air there was to breathe was foul. I wanted to move, and found no room.
I opened my eyes, and saw nothing. The most alarming circumstance
was the lack of air, and this enlightened me as to my situation. I
understood that no fresh air could penetrate to me, and that I must die.
This thought took off the sense of intolerable pain which had aroused
me. There was a violent singing in my ears. I heard--or I thought I
heard, I will assert nothing--groans from the world of dead among whom I
was lying. Some nights I still think I hear those stifled moans;
though the remembrance of that time is very obscure, and my memory very
indistinct, in spite of my impressions of far more acute suffering I was
fated to go through, and which have confused my ideas.

"But there was something more awful than cries; there was a silence such
as I have never known elsewhere--literally, the silence of the grave.
At last, by raising my hands and feeling the dead, I discerned a vacant
space between my head and the human carrion above. I could thus measure
the space, granted by a chance of which I knew not the cause. It would
seem that, thanks to the carelessness and the haste with which we had
been pitched into the trench, two dead bodies had leaned across and
against each other, forming an angle like that made by two cards when a
child is building a card castle. Feeling about me at once, for there
was no time for play, I happily felt an arm lying detached, the arm of
a Hercules! A stout bone, to which I owed my rescue. But for this
unhoped-for help, I must have perished. But with a fury you may imagine,
I began to work my way through the bodies which separated me from the
layer of earth which had no doubt been thrown over us--I say us, as if
there had been others living! I worked with a will, monsieur, for here I
am! But to this day I do not know how I succeeded in getting through the
pile of flesh which formed a barrier between me and life. You will say I
had three arms. This crowbar, which I used cleverly enough, opened out
a little air between the bodies I moved, and I economized my breath. At
last I saw daylight, but through snow!

"At that moment I perceived that my head was cut open. Happily my blood,
or that of my comrades, or perhaps the torn skin of my horse, who knows,
had in coagulating formed a sort of natural plaster. But, in spite
of it, I fainted away when my head cam