Things are bad!. The world’s collapsing!..
"Stop blocking the way you lousy pigs! Go take a crap you slimy lice! ”
Not everything’s said! Or carried out! Still things to do!.. Pirouette!
The engineering officer’s preparing something! Another blast of thunder! Sets the fuse at the small end. It’s a demon!
.. But suddenly his gadget roars out and crackles right between his fingers!.. the whole shebang blasts him, pours on him, tears him apart, somersaults him wildly away.. The column gets going, the motors are all roaring and spitting in an unbearable din!. Terrifying remarks and blasphemies!.
Everything! the carcasses! the junk! the tanks! piles upon the crunching and rattling caterpiller-guns that smash all interference under the direction of a quartermaster! It’s the saraband of fright, the fair under the crawling-dislocating thunder! It’s the rubber-man who wins! Ah! hooray for the cosmic scoundrel, the unscrupulous bachelor with the corkscrew bicycle, the armored stinker!..
The Fritz is peppering away like mad, swooping down from the skies! The louse! He’s bzzbzzing us! he’s sprinkling us from the summits, he’s enveloping us, he’s whirring at us!.. It’s the fury of murder, wild volleys and raging stabs! ricocheting all about! He’s watering us, spilling us to death! And then he starts us up again, he’s getting a big kick out of our dance! out of our stung and swaying rage! We’re stuck all right! A shell! Three enormous ones!.. Fright! And much too heavy! And one after the other!. The earth’s dying upside down!.. losing strength, shivering, groaning in the distance, out of hearing. as far as the low and gentle hillsides! Bust, echo! Bust, bomb! No mistake! It’s getting worse!
.. We’re going to die mashed up!.. like bedbugs!.. choking sulphurations! massed in the saltpeter, ravaging combustions! The dunghill’s raving! He’s eager up there!.. He’s sore about our trouble! The awful plane! He’s sugaring us again! And three loopings! And hail falls!.. A frying in the atmos-
phere! The cobblestones full of bull’s-eyes!.. The lady who got one in the back hugs a sheep lying there, shuffles off with it under the axles, creeps and convulses… farther off… grimaces, collapses, knocked over, her arms stretched like a cross. groans. stops moving!..
The ambulance, our ship of grace, can’t make the big cobblestones, skids, shimmies, wobbles, loses all its bolts, bumps into a flock of oxen, stallions, fowls, and then plops. a cart smacks it right in the ass. Bang!. The shock sends two tricycles flying, plus a nun and a policeman.. it’s the moment of absolution. all that on the bridge! Look at the poor auto lifted by the wind of the torpedoes twenty yards away! Horrible flight! And then two steps and two burps. There she is rolling down in the whirlwind of the slaughter. The mob catches up with us.. squeezes us.. The engine’s racing to get the hell away.. They’re frisking us, they’re hugging us fiercely! Our vehicle’s getting damned sore. We’re being hoisted in triumph!.. scaling over heads!.. roosting up there over the crowd. Bam!. Bang!. Three tough strikes! We flop! A "twelve-ton” truck full of railmen whacks us from the other side! Ah! made it!. Pushed around, torn from the tide! We’re knocked apart right in the middle of the mess!. The ambulance loses its front wheels!. The surging scatters us to bits!
.. It’s the turn of a baby carriage being carried away over our heads!. A little soldier’s lolling in it! His leg hanging out in shreds. pretty slick. Damned little soldier-boy! he’s making obscene gestures. We’re having fun with him! We’re all together in the atmosphere!. All seething in the whirl!
.. That devil up there’s sore at us.. He’s coming back.. strafing us like a tornado!.. Tobogganing down on us, blazing away, spurting out all his lightning.. The savage is cutting our heads off. the swine!.. He’s sweeping us into his belly! into his murderous din!..He’s climbing back very tiny into the clouds!.. He turns about on the ceiling! a fly!..
Who’s that dead in the gutter? They’re stumbling over it, it’s soft!.. There’s a belly there! wide open and the foot and leg twisted, folded in. One of Death’s acrobats!. blasted on the spot!
Zoom! Zoom! There’s no time to think!.. two enormous thuds. It’s the big river being hit downstream! The smooth water’s drinking two giant torpedoes!. That makes two wild corollae for it!. Two astounding water-volcano flowers!.. It all falls back. cascades over the bridge. We’re crushed under the spout, soaked, rolled, flattened by the cyclone.. vomited back… the mob catches up with us, sticks to us.. and then they open fire again. It’s cannon getting at us.. The parapet’s full of flashes. It must be coming from the little clouds over the church! must be a reconnaissance flight.. Other airmen trying to finish us up!.. They don’t give a damn, men, cattle or things!. They’re French or German!.. The situation’s getting critical.. My soaked clothes feel boiling. Confusion’s at its height?. A mother in tears on the parapet wants to throw herself into the abyss with her three little children!.. Seven workmen interfere and hold her back.. cool brave chaps.. They first finish their ham and headcheese!..Just let them dare touch her! she shrieks! such a terrifying shrill clamor that it blots out the other noises!.. You’re forced to look at her!.. A shell. Bam! hitting the bridge!.. The main arch blows up, splinters.. Digs a hollow in the middle… an enormous gaping… a crater that swallows up everything!.. The people melt and ram the crevices.. topple beneath the bitter smoke. into a hurricane of dust!
.. You can see a colonel, of Zouaves I think, floundering in the cataract. He succumbs beneath the weight of the corpses!
topples down to the bottom!.."Vive la France!” he finally cries… vanquished beneath the pile of bodies!.. There’re others alive who grab on to the walls of the gulf, they’re in rags because of the explosion, they make desperate efforts, fall down, they puke, they’re through.. They’ve been burned everywhere. A baby all naked surges up on the hood of a flaming truck. He’s roasted, done to a turn.. "Good God!.. Good God!. Shit! It's not right!”.. It’s the father in a sweat. Those are his very words. Then he looks for something to drink!. He yells at me if I’ve got anything. Canteen? Canteen?
The music’s not over, another archangel’s peppering us, swooping down from the sky at full speed… He tires us with his ravaging. We’re so crammed that we stop moving.. The bridge is rumbling.. wobbling on its arches!.. And then tic-tac! Rrooo! Rrooo!.. It’s' the music of the big slaughter! the sky’s rattling with rage against us!.. The water from underneath.. And then the abyss!.. It all blows up!..
Everything I’m telling you’s exact. There’s a lot more besides!.. But my memory’s out of breath! Too many people have walked over it.. like the bridge. over the memories.. as over the days!.. Too many people yelling battle!.. And then the smoke again. And I dive under the car. I’m telling it the way I’m thinking. Going down toward the floodgates, they were carousing something fantastic as far as the Orleans ramp!.. They were dancing worse than on the other, a hundred thousand times worse than the one in Avignon!.. In the forge of God’s Thunder!. And boom! and zimm! and Saint Mary! and dead and dead! in the Hurricane Ball!.. Look!. Look!. Unimportant!.. Even the world there turned inside out, an old soft broken-down umbrella!.. It drifted in the cyclones!. Too bad!. Rrpp!.. and Bing!.. Boom!. I saw it passing over the Grand Hotel! It was going fine! I saw it drifting.. swaying up there.. frolicking in the clouds!.. The bumbershoot and the main span! they were spinning around in the flurry. together!. among the
