Some hours later Adjutant Marcassin comes forward, a lantern in his hand, and in a strident voice calls the roll.  Then he goes away, and we begin again to wait.

At ten o’clock, after several false alarms, the right train is announced.  It comes up, distending as it comes, black and red.  It is already crowded, and it screams.  It stops, and turns the platform into a street.  We climb up and put ourselves away—­not without glimpses, by the light of lanterns moving here and there, of some chalk sketches on the carriages—­heads of pigs in spiked helmets, and the inscription, “To Berlin!”—­the only things which slightly indicate where we are going.

The train sets off.  We who have just got in crowd to the windows and try to look outside, towards the level crossing where, perhaps, the people in whom we live are still watching for us; but the eye can no longer pick up anything but a vague stirring, shaded with crayon and jumbled with nature.  We are blind and we fall back each to his place.  When we are enveloped in the iron-hammered rumble of advance, we fix up our luggage, arrange ourselves for the night, smoke, drink and talk.  Badly lighted and opaque with fumes, the compartment might be a corner of a tavern that has been caught up and swept away into the unknown.

Some conversation mixes its rumble with that of the train.  My neighbors talk about crops and sunshine and rain.  Others, scoffers and Parisians, speak of popular people and principally of music-hall singers.  Others sleep, lying somehow or other on the wood.  Their open mouths make murmur, and the oscillation jerks them without tearing them from their torpor.  I go over in my thoughts the details of the last day, and even my memories of times gone by when there was nothing going on.

* * * * * *

We traveled all night.  At long intervals some one would let a window drop at a station; a damp and cavernous breath would penetrate the overdone atmosphere of the carriage.  We saw darkness and some porter’s lantern dancing in the abyss of night.

Several times we made very long halts—­to let the trains of regular troops go by.  In one station where our train stood for hours, we saw several of them go roaring by in succession.  Their speed blurred the partitions between the windows and the huge vertebrae of the coaches, seeming to blend together the soldiers huddled there; and the glance which plunged into the train’s interior descried, in its feeble and whirling illumination, a long, continuous and tremulous chain, clad in blue and red.  Several times on the journey we got glimpses of these interminable lengths of humanity, hurled by machinery from everywhere to the frontiers, and almost towing each other.

CHAPTER X

THE WALLS

At daybreak there was a stop, and they said to us, “You’re there.”