At dawn I resumed my lookout at the loophole.  Quite near, on the slope of the little wood, the bushes and the bare branches are broidered with drops of water.  In front, under the fatal space where the eternal passage of projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, the field resembles a field, the road resembles a road.  Ultimately one makes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpse in a field—­a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades of grass disguise!  At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and it resembled the past.

Thus went the days by, the weeks and the months; four days in the front line, the harassing journey to and from it, the monotonous sentry-go, the spy-hole on the plain, the mesmerism of the empty outlook and of the deserts of waiting; and after that, four days of rest-camp full of marches and parades and great cleansings of implements and of streets, with regulations of the strictest, anticipating all the different occasions for punishment, a thousand fatigues, each with as many harsh knocks, the litany of optimist phrases, abstruse and utopian, in the orders of the day, and a captain who chiefly concerned himself with the two hundred cartridges and the reserve rations.  The regiment had no losses, or almost none; a few wounds during reliefs, and sometimes one or two deaths which were announced like accidents.  We only underwent great weariness, which goes away as fast as it comes.  The soldiers used to say that on the whole they lived in peace.

Marie would write to me, “The Piots have been saying nice things about you,” or “The Trompsons’ son is a second lieutenant,” or “If you knew all the contrivances people have been up to, to hide their gold since it’s been asked for so loudly!  If you knew what ugly tales there are!” or “Everything is just the same.”

* * * * * *

Once, when we were coming back from the lines and were entering our usual village, we did not stop there; to the great distress of the men who were worn out and yielding to the force of the knapsack.  We continued along the road through the evening with lowered heads; and one hour later we dropped off around dark buildings—­mournful tokens of an unknown place—­and they put us away among shadows which had new shapes.  From that time onwards, they changed the village at every relief, and we never knew what it was until we were there.  I was lodged in barns, into which one wriggled by a ladder; in spongy and steamy stables; in cellars where undisturbed draughts stirred up the moldy smells that hung there; in frail and broken hangars which seemed to brew bad weather; in sick and wounded huts; in villages remade athwart their phantoms; in trenches and in caves—­a world upside down.  We received the wind and the rain in our sleep.  Sometimes we were too brutally rescued from the pressure of the cold by braziers, whose poisonous heat split one’s head.  And we forgot it all at each change of scene.  I had begun to note the names of places we were going to, but I lost myself in the black swarm of words when I tried to recall them.  And the diversity and the crowds of the men around me were such that I managed only with difficulty to attach fleeting names to their faces.