The work went on.

On the third day a lull enabled us to complete our organisation. The
enemy was bombarding the town and the lines persistently. Our artillery
replied, shell for shell, in furious salvos; a sort of thunderous wall
rose around us which seemed to us like a rampart. ... The afflux of
wounded had diminished. We had just received men who had been fighting
in the open country, as in the first days of the war, but under a hail
of projectiles hitherto reserved for the destruction of fortresses. Our
comrade D----arrived from the battlefield on foot, livid, supporting his
shattered elbow. He stammered out a tragic story: his regiment had held
its ground under a surging tide of fire; thousands of huge shells had
fallen in a narrow ravine, and he had seen limbs hanging in the thicket,
a savage dispersal of human bodies. The men had held their ground, and
then had fought....

A quarter of an hour after his arrival D----, refreshed and
strengthened, was contemplating the big wound in his arm on the
operating table, and talking calmly of his ruined future....

Towards the evening of this day, we were able to go out of the building,
and breathe the unpolluted air for a few minutes.

The noise reigned supreme, as silence reigns elsewhere. We were
impregnated, almost intoxicated with it....

A dozen of those captive balloons which the soldiers call "sausages"
formed an aerial semi-circle and kept watch.

On the other side of the hills the German balloons also watched in the
purple mist to the East.

Night came, and the balloons remained faithfully at their posts. We were
in the centre of a circus of fire, woven by all the lightnings of the
cannonade. To the south-west, however, a black breach opened, and one
divined a free passage there towards the interior of the country and
towards silence. A few hundred feet from us, a cross-road continually
shelled by the enemy echoed to the shock of projectiles battering the
ground like hammers on an anvil. We often found at our feet fragments of
steel still hot, which in the gloom seemed slightly phosphorescent.

From this day forth, a skilful combination of our hours and our means
enabled us to take short spells of rest in turn. However, for a hundred
reasons sleep was impossible to me, and for several weeks I forgot what
it was to slumber.

I used to retire, then, from time to time to the room set apart for my
friend V----and myself, and lie down on a bed, overcome by a