“Well, if it’s got to be, come on.  Get on with it!”

They deliver up their bodies wholly—­their warm bodies, that the bitter cold and the wind and the sightless death touch as with women’s hands.  In these contacts between living beings and force, there is something carnal, virginal, divine.

* * * * * *

They have sent me into a listening post.  To get there I had to worm myself, bent double, along a low and obstructed sap.  In the first steps I was careful not to walk on the obstructions, and then I had to, and I dared.  My foot trembled on the hard or supple masses which peopled that sap.

On the edge of the hole—­there had been a road above it formerly, or perhaps even a market-place—­the trunk of a tree severed near the ground arose, short as a grave-stone.  The sight stopped me for a moment, and my heart, weakened no doubt by my physical destitution, kindled with pity for the tree become a tomb!

Two hours later I rejoined the section in its pit.  We abide there, while the cannonade increases.  The morning goes by, then the afternoon.  Then it is evening.

They make us go into a wide dugout.  It appears that an attack is developing somewhere.  From time to time, through a breach contrived between sandbags so decomposed and oozing that they seem to have lived, we go out to a little winterly and mournful crossing, to look about.  We consult the sky to determine the tempest’s whereabouts.  We can know nothing.

The artillery fire dazzles and then chokes up our sight.  The heavens are making a tumult of blades.

Monuments of steel break loose and crash above our heads.  Under the sky, which is dark as with threat of deluge, the explosions throw livid sunshine in all directions.  From one end to the other of the visible world the fields move and descend and dissolve, and the immense expanse stumbles and falls like the sea.  Towering explosions in the east, a squall in the south; in the zenith a file of bursting shrapnel like suspended volcanoes.

The smoke which goes by, and the hours as well, darken the inferno.  Two or three of us risk our faces at the earthen cleft and look out, as much for the purpose of propping ourselves against the earth as for seeing.  But we see nothing, nothing on the infinite expanse which is full of rain and dusk, nothing but the clouds which tear themselves and blend together in the sky, and the clouds which come out of the earth.

Then, in the slanting rain and the limitless gray, we see a man, one only, who advances with his bayonet forward, like a specter.

We watch this shapeless being, this thing, leaving our lines and going away yonder.

We only see one—­perhaps that is the shadow of another, on his left.

We do not understand, and then we do.  It is the end of the attacking wave.

What can his thoughts be—­this man alone in the rain as if under a curse, who goes upright away, forward, when space is changed into a shrieking machine?  By the light of a cascade of flashes I thought I saw a strange monk-like face.  Then I saw more clearly—­the face of an ordinary man, muffled in a comforter.