We have dressed ourselves all alike.  I look at the others since I cannot look at myself, and thus I see myself dimly.  Gloomily we eat stew, by the miserable illumination of a candle, in the dull desert of the mess room.  Then, our mess-tins cleaned, we go down to the great yard, gray and stagnant.  Just as we pour out into it, there is the clash of a closing gate and a tightened chain.  An armed sentry goes up and down before the gate.  It is forbidden to go out under pain of court-martial.  To westward, beyond some indistinct land, we see the buried station, reddening and smoking like a factory, and sending out rusty flashes.  On the other side is the trench of a street; and in its extended hollow are the bright points of some windows and the radiance of a shop.  With my face between the bars of the gate, I look on this reflection of the other life; then I go back to the black staircase, the corridor and the dormitory, I who am something and yet am nothing, like a drop of water in a river.

* * * * * *

We stretch ourselves on straw, in thin blankets.  I go to sleep with my head on the bundle of my civilian clothes.  In the morning I find myself again and throw off a long dream—­all at once impenetrable.

My neighbor, sitting on his straw with his hair over his nose, is occupied in scratching his feet.  He yawns into tears, and says to me, “I’ve dreamt about myself.”

* * * * * *

Several days followed each other.  We remained imprisoned in the barracks, in ignorance.  The only events were those related by the newspapers which were handed to us through the gates in the morning.  The war got on very slowly; it immobilized itself, and we—­we did nothing, between the roll-calls, the parades, and from time to time some cleaning fatigues.  We could not go into the town, and we waited for the evening—­standing, sitting, strolling in the mess room (which never seemed empty, so strong was the smell that filled it), wandering about the dark stairs and the corridors dark as iron, or in the yard, or as far as the gates, or the kitchens, which last were at the rear of the buildings, and smelt in turns throughout the day of coffee-grounds and grease.

We said that perhaps, undoubtedly indeed, we should stay there till the end of the war.  We moped.  When we went to bed we were tired with standing still, or with walking too slowly.  We should have liked to go to the front.

Marcassin, housed in the company office, was never far away, and kept an eye on us in silence.  One day I was sharply rebuked by him for having turned the water on in the lavatory at a time other than placarded.  Detected, I had to stand before him at attention.  He asked me in coarse language if I knew how to read, talked of punishment, and added, “Don’t do it again!” This tirade, perhaps justified on the whole, but tactlessly uttered by the quondam Petrolus, humiliated me deeply and left me gloomy all the day.  Some other incidents showed me that I no longer belonged to myself.