The Zone is in full summer: souls are found quiescent behind the pieces of wall, fast asleep down curled in shell-craters, out screwing under the culverts with gray shirttails hoisted, adrift dreaming in the middles of fields. Dreaming of food, oblivion, alternate histories. . . .
.....The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf before a tidal wave: sounds draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage, to gather, someplace else, to a great surge of noise. Cows--big lumoxes splotched black and white, harnessed now for the plowing because German horses in the Zone are all but extinct--will drudge with straight faces right on into minefields, sown black in the winter. The godawful blasts go drumming over the farmland, horns, hide and hamburger come showering down all over the place, and the dented bells lie quet in the clover. Horses might have known to keep clear--but the Germans wasted their horses, squandered the race, herding them into the worst of it, the swarms of steel, the rheumatic marshes, the unblanketed winter chills of our late Fronts. A few might have found safety with the Russians, who still care for horses. You hear them often in the evenings. Their campfires send up rays for miles from behind the stands of beech, through northern-summer haze that's almost dry, only enough of it to give a knife's edge to the firelight, a dozen accordians and concertinas all going at once in shaggy chords with a reed-ringing to it, and the songs full of plaintive stvyehs and znyis with voices of the girl auxiliaries clearest of all. The horses whicker and move in the rustling grass. The men and women are kind, resourceful, fanatical--they are the most joyous of the Zone's survivors. [Gravity's Rainbow, V336-337]