* * * * * *

We do not know where we are.

We have marched all night.  More weariness bends our spines again, more obscurity hums in our heads.  By following the bed of a valley, we have found trenches again, and then men.  These splayed and squelched alleys, with their fat and sinking sandbags, their props which rot like limbs, flow into wider pockets where activity prevails—­battalion H.Q., or dressing-stations.  About midnight we saw, through the golden line of a dugout’s half-open door, some officers seated at a white table—­a cloth or a map.  Some one cries, “They’re lucky!” The company officers are exposed to dangers as we are, but only in attacks and reliefs.  We suffer long.  They have neither the vigil at the loophole, nor the knapsack, nor the fatigues.  What always lasts is greater.

And now the walls of flabby flagstones and the open-mouthed caves have begun again.  Morning rises, long and narrow as our lot.  We reach a busy trench-crossing.  A stench catches my throat:  some cess-pool into which these streets suspended in the earth empty their sewage?  No, we see rows of stretchers, each one swollen.  There is a tent there of gray canvas, which flaps like a flag, and on its fluttering wall the dawn lights up a bloody cross.

* * * * * *

Sometimes, when we are high enough for our eyes to unbury themselves, I can dimly see some geometrical lines, so confused, so desolated by distance, that I do not know if it is our country or the other; even when one sees he does not know.  Our looks are worn away in looking.  We do not see, we are powerless to people the world.  We all have nothing in common but eyes of evening and a soul of night.

And always, always, in these trenches whose walls run down like waves, with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers go forward endlessly, towing each other.  They go as quickly as they can, as if the walls were going to close upon them.  They are bowed as if they were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which they carry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they might rocks in hell.  From minute to minute we are filling the places of the obliterated hosts who have passed this way like the wind or have stayed here like the earth.

We halt in a funnel.  We lean our backs against the walls, resting the packs on the projections which bristle from them.  But we examine these things coming out of the earth, and we smell that they are knees, elbows and heads.  They were interred there one day and the following days are disinterring them.  At the spot where I am, from which I have roughly and heavily recoiled with all my armory, a foot comes out from a subterranean body and protrudes.  I try to put it out of the way, but it is strongly incrusted.  One would have to break the corpse of steel, to make it disappear.  I look at the