They took the body away.  The men carried it and a third followed with the cap.  One of us said, “The war’s over for him!” And during the dead man’s recessional we were mustered, and we continued to draw nearer to the unknown.  But everything seemed to recede as fast as we advanced, even events.

* * * * * *

We wandered five days, six days, in the lines, almost without sleeping.  We stood for hours, for half-nights and half-days, waiting for ways to be clear that we could not see.  Unceasingly they made us go back on our tracks and begin over again.  We mounted guard in trenches, we fitted ourselves into some stripped and sinister corner which stood out against a charred twilight or against fire.  We were condemned to see the same abysses always.

For two nights we bent fiercely to the mending of an old third-line trench above the ruin of its former mending.  We repaired the long skeleton, soft and black, of its timbers.  From that dried-up drain we besomed the rubbish of equipment, of petrified weapons, of rotten clothes and of victuals, of a sort of wreckage of forest and house—­filthy, incomparably filthy, infinitely filthy.  We worked by night and hid by day.  The only light for us was the heavy dawn of evening when they dragged us from sleep.  Eternal night covered the earth.

After the labor, as soon as daybreak began to replace night with melancholy, we buried ourselves methodically in the depth of the caverns there.  Only a deadened murmur penetrated to them, but the rock moved by reason of the earthquakes.  When some one lighted his pipe, by that gleam we looked at each other.  We were fully equipped; we could start away at any minute; it was forbidden to take off the heavy jingling chain of cartridges around us.

I heard some one say, “In my country there are fields, and paths, and the sea; nowhere else in the world is there that.”

Among these shades of the cave—­an abode of the first men as it seemed—­I saw the hand start forth of him who existed on the spectacle of the fields and the sea, who was trying to show it and to seize it; or I saw around a vague halo four card-players stubbornly bent upon finding again something of an ancient and peaceful attachment in the faces of the cards; or I saw Margat flourish a Socialist paper that had fallen from Termite’s pocket, and burst into laughter at the censored blanks it contained.  And Majorat raged against life, caressed his reserve bottle with his lips till out of breath and then, appeased and his mouth dripping, said it was the only way to alleviate his imprisonment.  Then sleep slew words and gestures and thoughts.  I kept repeating some phrase to myself, trying in vain to understand it; and sleep submerged me, ancestral sleep so dreary and so deep that it seems there had only and ever been one long, lone sleep here on earth, above which our few actions float, and which ever returns to fill the flesh of man with night.