Even her professional eye no longer distinguished regiment
from regiment, dragoon from grenadier, Uhlan from Hussar or Landsturm.
Stripes, insignia, numerals, badges of rank, had lost their meaning.
Those who wore them no longer were individuals. They were not even
human. During the three last days the automobile, like a motor-boat
fighting the tide, had crept through a gray-green river of men, stained,
as though from the banks, by mud and yellow clay. And for hours, while
the car was blocked, and in fury the engine raced and purred, the
gray-green river had rolled past her, slowly but as inevitably as lava
down the slope of a volcano, bearing on its surface faces with staring
eyes, thousands and thousands of eyes, some fierce and bloodshot, others
filled with weariness, homesickness, pain. At night she still saw them:
the white faces under the sweat and dust, the eyes dumb, inarticulate,
asking the answer. She had been suffocated by German soldiers, by the
mass of them, engulfed and smothered; she had stifled in a land
inhabited only by gray-green ghosts.
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