After one hundred and thirty kilometers
of continuous walking up to Austerlitz,
the French soldiers finally arrived
in the dark of the night, at the battlefield,
not yet dirty of blood and dead. They were
unnaturally tired, and collapsed
on the frozen meadows, no longer able
to feel the icy caress of the frost,
slow and cold omen of that of the death:
they fell asleep, fainted from fatigue,
fleeing for a few hours from the honor
of massacring twenty-years-old boys,
gripped in the shakles of the duty;
there never will be enough breath
to curse the foolish who invented
the glory of killing other people.