My sentry turn began immediately, and the lieutenant posted me at a loophole.  He made me put my face to the hole and explained to me that there was a wooded slope, right in front of us, of which the bottom was occupied by the enemy; and to the right of us, three hundred yards away, the Chauny road—­“They’re there.”  I had to watch the black hollow of the little wood, and at every star-shell the creamy expanse which divided our refuge from the distant hazy railing of the trees along the road.  He told me what to do in case of alarm and left me quite alone.

Alone, I shivered.  Fatigue had emptied my head and was weighing on my heart.  Going close to the loophole, I opened my eyes wide through the enemy night, the fathomless, thinking night.

I thought I could see some of the dim shadows of the plain moving, and some in the chasm of the wood, and everywhere!  Affected by terror and a sense of my huge responsibility, I could hardly stifle a cry of anguish.  But they did not move.  The fearful preparations of the shades vanished before my eyes and the stillness of lifeless things showed itself to me.

I had neither knapsack nor pouches, and I wrapped myself in my blanket.  I remained at ease, encircled to the horizon by the machinery of war, surmounted by claps of living thunder.  Very gently, my vigil relieved and calmed me.  I remembered nothing more about myself.  I applied myself to watching.  I saw nothing, I knew nothing.

After two hours, the sound of the natural and complaisant steps of the sentry who came to relieve me brought me completely back to myself.  I detached myself from the spot where I had seemed riveted and went to sleep in the “grotto.”

The dug-out was very roomy, but so low that in one place one had to crawl on hands and knees to slip under its rough and mighty roof.  It was full of heavy damp, and hot with men.  Extended in my place on straw-dust, my neck propped by my knapsack, I closed my eyes in comfort.  When I opened them, I saw a group of soldiers seated in a circle and eating from the same dish, their heads blotted out in the darkness of the low roof.  Their feet, grouped round the dish, were shapeless, black, and trickling, like stone disinterred.  They ate in common, without table things, no man using more than his hands.

The man next me was equipping himself to go on sentry duty.  He was in no hurry.  He filled his pipe, drew from his pocket a tinder-lighter as long as a tapeworm, and said to me, “You’re not going on again till six o’clock.  Ah, you’re very lucky!”

Diligently he mingled his heavy tobacco-clouds with the vapors from all those bodies which lay around us and rattled in their throats.  Kneeling at my feet to arrange his things, he gave me some advice, “No need to get a hump, mind.  Nothing ever happens here.  Getting here’s by far the worst.  On that job you get it hot, specially when you’ve the bad luck to be sleepy, or it’s not raining, but after that you’re a workman, and you forget about it.  The most worst, it’s the open crossing.  But nobody I know’s ever stopped one there.  It was other blokes.  It’s been like this for two months, old man, and we’ll be able to say we’ve been through the war without a chilblain, we shall.”