thless. He
takes him by the sleeve and drags him forward like a stubborn
shaft-horse.

"We're right!" says Poupardin suddenly. "Yes, I remember that tree.
It's the Pylones road!"

"Ah!" wails Blaire, whose breathing is shaking him like an engine. He
throws himself forward with a last impulse--and sits down on the ground.

"Halt!" cries a sentry--"Good Lord!" he stammers as he sees the four
poilus. "Where the--where are you coming from, that way?"

They laugh, jump about like puppets, full-blooded and streaming with
perspiration, blacker than ever in the night. The German officer's
helmet is gleaming in the hands of Pepin. "Oh, Christ!" murmurs the
sentry, with gaping mouth, "but what's been up?"

An exuberant reaction excites and bewitches them. All talk at once. In
haste and confusion they act again the drama which hardly yet they
realize is over. They had gone wrong when they left the sleepy sentry
and had taken the International Trench, of which a part is ours and
another part German. Between the French and German sections there is no
barricade or division. There is merely a sort of neutral zone, at the
two ends of which sentries watch ceaselessly. No doubt the German
watcher was not at his post, or likely he hid himself when he saw the
four shadows, or perhaps be doubled back and had not time to bring up
reinforcements. Or perhaps, too, the German officer had strayed too far
ahead in the neutral zone. In short, one understands what happened
without understanding it.

"The funny part of it," says Pepin, "is that we knew all about that,
and never thought to be careful about it when we set off."

"We were looking for matches," says Volpatte.

"And we've got some!" cries Pepin. "You've not lost the flamers, old
broomstick?"

"No damned fear!" says Blaire; "Boche matches are better stuff than
ours. Besides, they're all we've got to light our fire! Lose my box?
Let any one try to pinch it off me!"

"We're behind time--the soup-water'll be freezing. Hurry up, so far.
Afterwards there'll be a good yarn to tell in the sewer where the boys
are, about what we did to the Boches."

XIX

Bombardment

WE are in the flat country, a vast mistiness, but above it is dark
blue. The end of the night is marked by a little falling snow which
powders our shoulders and the folds in our sleeves. We are marching in
fours, hooded. We seem in the turbid twilight to be the wandering
survivors of one Northern district wh