* * * * * *

Suddenly we learned that nothing was going to happen!  It was all over for us, and we were going to return to the rest-camp.  We said it over again to ourselves.  And one evening they said, “We’re returning,” although they did not know, as they went on straight before them, whether they were going forward or backward.

In the plaster-kiln which we are marching past there is a bit of candle, and sunk underneath its feeble illumination there are four men.  Nearer, one sees that it is a soldier, guarding three prisoners.  The sight of these enemy soldiers in greenish and red rags gives us an impression of power, of victory.  Some voices question them in passing.  They are dismayed and stupefied; the fists that prop up their yellow cheekbones protrude triangular caricatures of features.  Sometimes, at the cut of a frank question, they show signs of lifting their heads, and awkwardly try to give vent to an answer.

“What’s he say, that chap?” they asked Sergeant Muller.

“He says that war’s none of their fault; it’s the big people’s.”

“The swine!” grunts Margat.

We climb the hill and go down the other side of it.  Meandering, we steer towards the infernal glimmers down yonder.  At the foot of the hill we stop.  There ought to be a clear view, but it is evening—­because of the bad weather and because the sky is full of black things and of chemical clouds with unnatural colors.  Storm is blended with war.  Above the fierce and furious cry of the shells I heard, in domination over all, the peaceful boom of thunder.

They plant us in subterranean files, facing a wide plain of gentle gradient which dips from the horizon towards us, a plain with a rolling jumble of thorn-brakes and trees, which the gale is seizing by the hair.  Squalls charged with rain and cold are passing over and immensifying it; and there are rivers and cataclysms of clamor along the trajectories of the shells.  Yonder, under the mass of the rust-red sky and its sullen flames, there opens a yellow rift where trees stand forth like gallows.  The soil is dismembered.  The earth’s covering has been blown a lot in slabs, and its heart is seen reddish and lined white—­butchery as far as the eye can see.

There is nothing now but to sit down and recline one’s back as conveniently as possible.  We stay there and breathe and live a little; we are calm, thanks to that faculty we have of never seeing either the past or the future.

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XIII

WHITHER GOEST THOU?

But soon a shiver has seized all of us.

“Listen!  It’s stopped!  Listen!”

The whistle of bullets has completely ceased, and the artillery also.  The lull is fantastic.  The longer it lasts the more it pierces us with the uneasiness of beasts.  We lived in eternal noise; and now that it is hiding, it shakes and rouses us, and would drive us mad.