180
PARTISAN REVIEW
pressing to his lips a handkerchief dampened with chlorine, looks
timidly into the great blaze of the flame-thrower
his
supply-sergeant
hands to
him;
the sergeant takes away the haystacks, one by one,
the hedge, the mill-dam, and puts in their place the craters of the
moon. The winter comes now, flake by flake; the snowflakes or sol–
diers (it is impossible to distinguish-under the microscope each one
is individual) are numbered by accountants, who trace with their
fingers, in black trenches filled by the dancing snow, the unlikely
figures of the dead. The fingers, wooden with cold, work slowly and
at last are still; the last figures, whitening, whitening, vanish into their
shining ground.
But before, somewhere else, there is a soldier. He is half-sitting,
half-lying against what seems a hillside- but at the bottom, under
the grass and weeds and dirt, there are sand-bags. He is dressed all
in grey-even his boots are grey, and merge imperceptibly into
his
face-grey with wrinkles and spots and ragged holes: he has become
grey as a snowman is white. He has pushed
his
grey hand between
his grey knees (drawn up a little) as if it were cold; but his dark
brown hand is folded under his head, as if he were leaning on it
patiently or thoughtfully. Part of his face is dark brown, and the rest
has trickles of dark brown like contours on its grey;
his
nose is the
white bill of a goose.
He has been dead for months-that is to say for minutes, for a
century; if because of his death his armies have conquered the world,
and brought to its peoples food, justice, and art, it has been a good
bargain for all of them but
him.
Underneath his picture there is writ–
ten, about his life, his death, or his war:
Es war ein Traum.
It is the dream from
w~ch
no one wakes.
RANDALL JARRELL
