We got out, yawning, our teeth chattering, and grimy with night, on to a platform black-smudged by drizzling rain, in the middle of a sheet of mist which was torn by blasts of distant whistling.  Disinterred from the carriages, our shadows heaped themselves there and waited, like bales of goods in the dawn’s winter.

Adjutant Marcassin, who had gone in quest of instructions, returned at last.  “It’s that way.”

He formed us in fours.  “Forward!  Straighten up!  Keep step!  Look as if you had something about you.”

The rhythm of the step pulled at our feet and dovetailed us together.  The adjutant marched apart along the little column.  Questioned by one of us who knew him intimately, he made no reply.  From time to time he threw a quick glance, like the flick of a whip, to make sure that we were in step.

I thought I was going again to the old barracks, where I did my term of service, but I had a sadder disappointment than was reasonable.  Across some land where building was going on, deeply trenched, beplastered and soiled with white, we arrived at a new barracks, sinisterly white in a velvet pall of fog.  In front of the freshly painted gate there was already a crowd of men like us, clothed in subdued civilian hues in the coppered dust of the first rays of day.

They made us sit on forms round the guard room.  We waited there all the day.  As the scorching sun went round it forced us to change our places several times.  We ate with our knees for tables, and as I undid the little parcels that Marie had made, it seemed to me that I was touching her hands.  When the evening had fallen, a passing officer noticed us, made inquiries, and we were mustered.  We plunged into the night of the building.  Our feet stumbled and climbed helter-skelter, between pitched walls up the steps of a damp staircase, which smelt of stale tobacco and gas-tar, like all barracks.  They led us into a dark corridor, pierced by little pale blue windows, where draughts came and went violently, a corridor spotted at each end by naked gas-jets, their flames buffeted and snarling.

A lighted doorway was stoppered by a throng—­the store-room.  I ended by getting in in my turn, thanks to the pressure of the compact file which followed me, and pushed me like a spiral spring.  Some barrack sergeants were exerting themselves authoritatively among piles of new-smelling clothes, of caps and glittering equipment.  Geared into the jerky hustle from which we detached ourselves one by one, I made the tour of the place, and came out of it wearing red trousers and carrying my civilian clothes, and a blue coat on my arm; and not daring to put on either my hat or the military cap that I held in my hand.