Many of the
women seemed strong and young; their faces were on the whole
cheerful--a brazen indifference to anything and everything was their
attitude. There were many children. Two gendarmes guarded them with
rough friendly discipline. I thought that I had seen nothing more
terrible at the war than the eager pitiful docility with which they
moved to and fro in obedience to the gendarmes' orders. A dreadful,
broken, creeping submission....
But it was their fantasy, their coloured incredible unreality that
overwhelmed me. The building, black and twisted against the hard blue
sky, raised its head behind us like a malicious monster. Before us
this crowd, all tattered faded pieces of scarlet and yellow and blue,
men with huge noses, sunken eyes, sharp chins, long skinny hands,
women with hard, bright, dead faces, little children with eyes that
were afraid and indifferent, hungry and mad, all this crowd swaying
before us, with the cannon muttering beyond the walls, and the thin
miserable thread of the funeral hymn trickling like water under our
feet.
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