After several halts, when we have allowed ourselves to collapse on our haversacks at the foot of the stacked rifles—­stacks that form on the call of the whistle with feverish haste and exasperating delay, through our blindness in that atmosphere of ink-dawn reveals itself, extends, and acquires the domain of Space.  The walls of the Shadow crumble in vague ruin.  Once more we pass under the grand panorama of the day’s unfolding upon the ever-wandering horde that we are.

We emerge at last from this night of marching, across concentric circles as it seems, of darkness less dark, then of half-shadow, then of gloomy light.  Legs have a wooden stiffness, backs are benumbed, shoulders bruised.  Faces are still so gray or so black, one would say they had but half rid themselves of the night.  Now, indeed, one never throws it off altogether.

It is into new quarters that the great company is going—­this time to rest.  What will the place be like that we have to live in for eight days?  It is called, they say—­but nobody is certain of anything—­Gauchin-l’Abbe.  We have heard wonders about it—­“It appears to be just it.”

In the ranks of the companies whose forms and features one begins to make out in the birth of morning, and to distinguish the lowered heads and yawning mouths, some voices are heard in still higher praise.  “There never were such quarters.  The Brigade’s there, and the court-martial.  You can get anything in the shops.”—­“If the Brigade’s there, we’re all right.”—­

“Think we can find a table for the squad?”—­“Everything you want, I tell you.”

A pessimist prophet shakes his head:  “What these quarters’ll be like where we ye never been, I don’t know,” he says.  “What I do know is that it’ll be like the others.”

But we don’t believe him, and emerging from the fevered turmoil of the night, it seems to all that it is a sort of Promised Land we are approaching by degrees the light brings us out of the east and the icy air towards the unknown village.

At the foot of a bill in the half-light, we reach some houses, still slumbering and wrapped in heavy grayness

“There it is!”

Poof!  We’ve done twenty-eight kilometers in the night.  But what of that?  There is no halt.  We go past the houses, and they sink back again into their vague vapors and their mysterious shroud.

“Seems we’ve got to march a long time yet.  It’s always there, there, there!”

We march like machines, our limbs invaded by a sort of petrified torpor; our joints cry aloud, and force us to make echo.

Day comes slowly, for a blanket of mist covers the earth.  It is so cold that the men dare not sit down during the halts, though overborne by weariness, and they pace to and fro in the damp obscurity like ghosts.  The besom of a biting wintry wind whips our skin, sweeps away and scatters our words and our sighs.