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sounds now and then, other ones too occasionally, as if a paw was
being put down, a body turned over. Breathing, too.
    He was not alone there. Animals? Would he be eaten later on?
Had they already smelled his blood? His teeth chattered with fear;
his knees, too, began to tremble and he no longer had the power
to subdue them.
    Though he did not know yet whether the end of his life was
imminent, his fear was already accompanied by the feeling of
complete desolation each dying human being experiences in his
last moments of consciousness. No one any longer could do
anything for him; all of humanity had turned away from him: he
was alone. All his past experience appeared to have been deception.
To be betrayed by life itself: this is the bitter end of every man.
    Yet, the space he was lying in seemed gradually to clear up a
bit; perhaps his eyes, blinded at first by the sudden darkness, were
slowly getting used to it. He began to discern something, to
distinguish between things in the dark. The pale gleam of limbs, it
would seem. Dim movement, here and there. He recognised human
forms, mainly lying down, a few sitting up. No, he had not ended
up in an animal pit but in a human one. It grew ever clearer. The
entire floor of the subterranean hall seemed covered with a curious
life form, with a layer of the living.
    Slowly, the terrible truth penetrated his tortured brain: here, in
this bottom most darkness, the warriors of vanquished peoples
were left to their own devices.

    No one any longer spoke a word; not even the whispers
between two of them could be heard; all were completely cast back
upon themselves. Language had ceased to exist. Nothing else
remained but resignedly to undergo the decline of the body.
    A movement seldom came, and extremely slowly even then;
movement had become precious, it took away from the only thing
that remained to them and upon which their lifespan depended:
their reserves of strength.
    He had a number of wounds but there was no point in
examining them; nothing could be done about them anyway. Just
wait and see whether he would still survive the healing of his
wounds. It was turning into a contest.
    There was nothing to do except cling to life. Escape was out of
the question: that which walled them in was the impenetrable rock
of the earth itself. And concerted action could never again go forth
from this realm of shades: at best, concerted death would. In the
feeble dusk which grew no clearer, he distinctly saw attitudes of
dull resignation all around him, of surrender to the waiting, the
waiting for nothingness.
    He, too, settled himself down as comfortably as possible on the
warm rock in such a way as to benefit most of its support, closed
his eyes and did the only thing he was still capable of doing and
which they all did: in his thoughts he returned to the past, to
where his freedom lay. He had a sudden urge to re-experience his
entire past life, more clearly, more consciously than the first time,
to realise, before the end, an inner flowering of the images of his
memory the way a tree, too, wastes its last strength in an
uncommon flowering.
    Particularly the first part of his life, before the start of the war,
was what he would remember at leisure: when they were still
happy and had feasts, when the world was still a friendly dwelling
place to him. The darkness turned out to help him in this; in the
dark he could bring those images clearly to mind, and the silence,
too, allowed him to hear the sounds of the past more clearly. This,
to all, was the only thing that remained.
    He managed to lull himself within his memories to such an extent
that, occasionally, he would catch himself out smiling. In this pit
that seemed like a blasphemy, its negation. It would only happen
when he felt little pain. Each time when, as a result of lying for too long
in the same position, his wounds began to smart, his thoughts
would stray to the war, to his life as a