On the Friday at three o’clock we were paraded in marching order in the school yard.  Great stones, detached from walls and arches, lay about the forsaken grass like tombs.  Hustled by the wind, we were reviewed by the captain, who fumbled in our cartridge-pouches and knapsacks with the intention of giving imprisonment to those who had not the right quantity of cartridges and iron rations.  In the evening we set off, laughing and singing, along the great curves of the road.  At night we arrived swaying with fatigue and savagely silent, at a slippery and interminable ascent which stood out against stormy rain-clouds as heavy as dung-hills.  Many dark masses stumbled and fell with a crash of accoutrements on that huge sloping sewer.  As they swarmed up the chaos of oblique darkness which pushed them back, the men gave signs of exhaustion and anger.  Cries of “Forward!  Forward!” surrounded us on all sides, harsh cries like barks, and I heard, near me, Adjutant Marcassin’s voice, growling, “What about it, then?  It’s for France’s sake!” Arrived at the top of the hill, we went down the other slope.  The order came to put pipes out and advance in silence.  A world of noises was coming to life in the distance.

A gateway made its sudden appearance in the night.  We scattered among flat buildings, whose walls here and there showed black holes, like ovens, while the approaches were obstructed with plaster rubbish and nail-studded beams.  In places the recent collapse of stones, cement and plaster had laid on the bricks a new and vivid whiteness that was visible in the dark.

“It’s the glass works,” said a soldier to me.

We halted a moment in a passage whose walls and windows were broken, where we could not make a step or sit down without breaking glass.  We left the works by sticky footpaths, full of rubbish at first, and then of mud.  Across marshy flats, chilly and sinister, obscurely lighted by the night, we came to the edge of an immense and pallid crater.  The depths of this abyss were populated with glimmers and murmurs; and all around a soaked and ink-black expanse of country glistened to infinity.

“It’s the quarry,” they informed me.

Our endless and bottomless march continued.  Sliding and slipping we descended, burying ourselves in these profundities and gropingly encountering the hurly-burly of a convoy of carts and the advance guard of the regiment we were relieving.  We passed heaped-up hutments at the foot of the circular chalky cliff that we could see dimly drawn among the black circles of space.  The sound of shots drew near and multiplied on all sides; the vibration of artillery fire outspread under our feet and over our heads.

I found myself suddenly in front of a narrow and muddy ravine into which the others were plunging one by one.

“It’s the trench,” whispered the man who was following me; “you can see its beginning, but you never see its blinking end.  Anyway, on you go!”