At last the sun pierces the reek that spreads over us and soaks what it touches, and something like a fairy glade opens out in the midst of this gloom terrestrial.  The regiment stretches itself and wakes up in truth, with slow-lifted faces to the gilded silver of the earliest rays.  Quickly, then, the sun grows fiery, and now it is too hot.  In the ranks we pant and sweat, and our grumbling is louder even than just now, when our teeth were chattering and the fog wet-sponged our hands and faces.

It is a chalk country through which we are passing on this torrid forenoon—­“They mend this road with lime, the dirty devils!” The road has become blinding—­a long-drawn cloud of dessicated chalk and dust that rises high above our columns and powders us as we go.  Faces turn red, and shine as though varnished; some of the full-blooded ones might be plastered with vaseline.  Cheeks and foreheads are coated with a rusty paste which agglutinates and cracks.  Feet lose their dubious likeness to feet and might have paddled in a mason’s mortar-trough.  Haversacks and rifles are powdered in white, and our legion leaves to left and right a long milky track on the bordering grass.  And to crown all—­“To the right!  A convoy!”

We bear to the right, hurriedly, and not without bumpings.  The convoy of lorries, a long chain of foursquare and huge projectiles, rolling up with diabolical din, hurls itself along the road.  Curse it!  One after another, they gather up the thick carpet of white powder that upholsters the ground and send it broadcast over our shoulders!  Now we are garbed in a stuff of light gray and our faces are pallid masks, thickest on the eyebrows and mustaches, on beards, and the cracks of wrinkles.  Though still ourselves, we look like strange old men.

“When we’re old buffers, we shall be as ugly as this,” says Tirette.

“Tu craches blanc,” declares Biquet. [note 1]

When a halt puts us out of action, you might take us for rows of plaster statues, with some dirty indications of humanity showing through.

We move again, silent and chagrined.  Every step becomes hard to complete.  Our faces assume congealed and fixed grimaces under the wan leprosy of dust.  The unending effort contracts us and quite fills us with dismal weariness and disgust.

We espy at last the long-sought oasis.  Beyond a hill, on a still higher one, some slated roofs peep from clusters of foliage as brightly green as a salad.  The village is there, and our looks embrace it, but we are not there yet.  For a long time it seems to recede as fast as the regiment crawls towards it.

At long last, on the stroke of noon, we reach the quarters that had begun to appear a pretense and a legend.  In regular step and with rifles on shoulders, the regiment floods the street of Gauchin-l’Abbe right to its edges.  Most of the villages of the Pas du Calais are composed of a single street, but such a street!  It is often several kilometers long.  In this one, the street divides in front of the mairie and forms two others, so that the hamlet becomes a big Y, brokenly bordered by low-built dwellings.