grappling hooks in the water among them, mud and surface and faces lit up by phosphorus flares in the sky around them. All through the night, weeping and shouting, they had to stop each other going crazy. Their clothes full of winter river, (the bridge slowly eased into a road above their heads. )And two days later another river. Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless. The sapper units slid in with ropes, carried cables over their shoulders and spannered the bolts, oil-covered to silence the metals, and then the army marched over. Drove over the prefabricated bridge with the sappers still in the water below. So often they were caught in midstream when the shells came, flaring into mudbanks breaking apart the steel and iron into stones.