We had never passed that way but in the dark, and we did not recognize the scenes now that we saw them.  From the lane which we descended, holding ourselves back, to gain the trench, we saw for the first time the desert through which we had so often passed—­plains and lagoons unlimited.

The waterlogged open country, with its dispirited pools and their smoke-like islets of trees, seemed nothing but a reflection of the leaden, cloud-besmirched sky.  The walls of the trenches, pallid as ice-floes, marked with their long, sinuous crawling where they had been slowly torn from the earth by the shovels.  These embossings and canals formed a complicated and incalculable network, smudged near at hand by bodies and wreckage; dreary and planetary in the distance.  One could make out the formal but hazy stakes and posts, aligned in the distance to the end of sight; and here and there the swellings and round ink-blots of the dugouts.  In some sections of trench one could sometimes even descry black lines, like a dark wall between other walls, and these lines stirred—­they were the workmen of destruction.  A whole region in the north, on higher ground, was a forest flown away, leaving only a stranded bristling of masts, like a quayside.  There was thunder in the sky, but it was drizzling, too, and even the flashes were gray above that infinite liquefaction in which each regiment was as lost as each man.

We entered the plain and disappeared into the trench.  The “open crossing” was now pierced by a trench, though it was little more than begun.  Amid the smacks of the bullets which blurred its edges we had to crawl flat on our bellies, along the sticky bottom of this gully.  The close banks gripped and stopped our packs so that we floundered perforce like swimmers, to go forward in the earth, under the murder in the air.  For a second the anguish and the effort stopped my heart and in a nightmare I saw the cadaverous littleness of my grave closing over me.

At the end of this torture we got up again, in spite of the knapsacks.  The last star-shells were sending a bloody aurora borealis into the morning.  Sudden haloes drew our glances and crests of black smoke went up like cypresses.  On both sides, in front and behind, we heard the fearful suicide of shells.

* * * * * *

We marched in the earth’s interior until evening.  From time to time one hoisted the pack up or pressed down one’s cap into the sweat of the forehead; had it fallen it could not have been picked up again in the mechanism of the march; and then we began again to fight with the distance.  The hand contracted on the rifle-sling was tumefied by the shoulder-straps and the bent arm was broken.

Like a regular refrain the lamentation of Melusson came to me.  He kept saying that he was going to stop, but he did not stop, ever, and he even butted into the back of the man in front of him when the whistle went for a halt.