“What’s that?”

We rub our eyelids and open wide our eyes.  We hoist our heads with no precaution above the crumbled parapet.  We question each other—­“D’you see?”

No doubt about it; the shadows are moving along the ground wherever one looks.  There is no point in the distance where they are not moving.

Some one says at last:—­

“Why, it’s the Boches, to be sure!”

And then we recognize on the sloping plain the immense geographical form of the army that is coming upon us!

* * * * * *

Behind and in front of us together, a terrible crackle bursts forth and makes somber captives of us in the depth of a valley of flames, and flames which illuminate the plain of men marching over the plain.  They reveal them afar, in incalculable number, with the first ranks detaching themselves, wavering a little, and forming again, the chalky soil a series of points and lines like something written!

Gloomy stupefaction makes us dumb in face of that living immensity.  Then we understand that this host whose fountain-head is out of sight is being frightfully cannonaded by our 75’s; the shells set off behind us and arrive in front of us.  In the middle of the lilliputian ranks the giant smoke-clouds leap like hellish gods.  We see the flashes of the shells which are entering that flesh scattered over the earth.  It is smashed and burned entirely in places, and that nation advances like a brazier.

Without a stop it overflows towards us.  Continually the horizon produces new waves.  We hear a vast and gentle murmur rise.  With their tearing lights and their dull glimmers they resemble in the distance a whole town making festival in the evening.

We can do nothing against the magnitude of that attack, the greatness of that sum total.  When a gun has fired short, we see more clearly the littleness of each shot.  Fire and steel are drowned in all that life; it closes up and re-forms like the sea.

“Rapid fire!”

We fire desperately.  But we have not many cartridges.  Since we came into the first line they have ceased to inspect our load of ammunition; and many men, especially these last days, have got rid of a part of the burden which bruises hips and belly and tears away the skin.  They who are coming do not fire; and above the long burning thicket of our line one can see them still flowing from the east.  They are closely massed in ranks.  One would say they clung to each other as though welded.  They are not using their rifles.  Their only weapon is the infinity of their number.  They are coming to bury us under their feet.

Suddenly a shift in the wind brings us the smell of ether.  The divisions advancing on us are drunk!  We declare it, we tell it to ourselves frantically.

“They’re on fire!  They’re on fire!” cries the trembling voice of the man beside me, whose shoulders are shaken by the shots he is hurling.