We followed the trench along for three hours.  For three hours we continued to immerse ourselves in distance and solitude, to immure ourselves in night, scraping its walls with our loads, and sometimes violently pulled up, where the defile shrunk into strangulation by the sudden wedging of our pouches.  It seemed as if the earth tried continually to clasp and choke us, that sometimes it roughly struck us.  Above the unknown plains in which we were hiding, space was shot-riddled.  A few star-shells were softly whitening some sections of the night, revealing the excavations’ wet entrails and conjuring up a file of heavy shadows, borne down by lofty burdens, tramping in a black and black-bunged impasse, and jolting against the eddies.  When great guns were discharged all the vault of heaven was lighted and lifted and then fell darkly back.

“Look out!  The open crossing!”

A wall of earth rose in tiers before us.  There was no outlet.  The trench came to a sudden end—­to be resumed farther on, it seemed.

“Why?” I asked, mechanically.

They explained to me:  “It’s like that.”  And they added, “You stoop down and get a move on.”

The men climbed the soft steps with bent heads, made their rush one by one and ran hard into the belt whose only remaining defense was the dark.  The thunder of shrapnel that shattered and dazzled the air here and there showed me too frightfully how fragile we all were.  In spite of the fatigue clinging to my limbs, I sprang forward in my turn with all my strength, fiercely pursuing the signs of an overloaded and rattling body which ran in front; and I found myself again in a trench, breathless.  In my passage I had glimpses of a somber field, bullet-smacked and hole pierced, with silent blots outspread or doubled, and a litter of crosses and posts, as black and fantastic as tall torches extinguished, all under a firmament where day and night immensely fought.

“I believe I saw some corpses,” I said to him who marched in front of me; and there was a break in my voice.

“You’ve just left your village,” he replied; “you bet there’s some stiffs about here!”

I laughed also, in the delight of having got past.  We began again to march one behind another, swaying about, hustled by the narrowness of this furrow they had scooped to the ancient depth of a grave, panting under the load, dragged towards the earth by the earth and pushed forward by will-power, under a sky shrilling with the dizzy flight of bullets, tiger-striped with red, and in some seconds saturated with light.  At forks in the way we turned sometimes right and sometimes left, all touching each other, the whole huge body of the company fleeing blindly towards its bourne.

For the last time they halted us in the middle of the night.  I was so weary that I propped my knees against the wet wall and remained kneeling for some blissful minutes.