They draw near.  They are lighted from below along the descent by the flashing footlights of our fire; they grow bigger, and already we can make out the forms of soldiers.  They are at the same time in order and in disorder.  Their outlines are rigid, and one divines faces of stone.  Their rifles are slung and they have nothing in their hands.  They come on like sleep-walkers, only knowing how to put one foot before the other, and surely they are singing.  Yonder, in the bulk of the invasion, the guns continue to destroy whole walls and whole structures of life at will.  On the edges of it we can clearly see isolated silhouettes and groups as they fall, with an extended line of figures like torchlights.

Now they are there, fifty paces away, breathing their ether into our faces.  We do not know what to do.  We have no more cartridges.  We fix bayonets, our ears filled with that endless, undefined murmur which comes from their mouths and the hollow rolling of the flood that marches.

A shout spreads behind us: 

“Orders to fall back!”

We bow down and evacuate the trench by openings at the back.  There are not a lot of us, we who thought we were so many.  The trench is soon empty, and we climb the hill that we descended in coming.  We go up towards our 75’s, which are in lines behind the ridge and still thundering.  We climb at a venture, in the open, by vague paths and tracks of mud; there are no trenches.  During the gray ascent it is a little clearer than a while ago:  they do not fire on us.  If they fired on us, we should be killed.  We climb in flagging jumps, in jerks, pounded by the panting of the following waves that push us before them, closely beset by their clattering, nor turning round to look again.  We hoist ourselves up the trembling flanks of the volcano that clamors up yonder.  Along with us are emptied batteries also climbing, and horses and clouds of steam and all the horror of modern war.  Each man pushes this retreat on, and is pushed by it; and as our panting becomes one long voice, we go up and up, baffled by our own weight which tries to fall back, deformed by our knapsacks, bent and silent as beasts.

From the summit we see the trembling inundation, murmuring and confused, filling the trenches we have just left, and seeming already to overflow them.  But our eyes and ears are violently monopolized by the two batteries between which we are passing; they are firing into the infinity of the attackers, and each shot plunges into life.  Never have I been so affected by the harrowing sight of artillery fire.  The tubes bark and scream in crashes that can hardly be borne; they go and come on their brakes in starts of fantastic distinctness and violence.

In the hollows where the batteries lie hid, in the middle of a fan-shaped phosphorescence, we see the silhouettes of the gunners as they thrust in the shells.  Every time they maneuver the breeches, their chests and arms are scorched by a tawny reflection.  They are like the implacable workers of a blast furnace; the breeches are reddened by the heat of the explosions, the steel of the guns is on fire in the evening.