o are trekking to another.

We have followed a road and have crossed the ruins of
Ablain-Saint-Nazaire. We have had confused glimpses of its whitish
heaps of houses and the dim spider-webs of its suspended roofs. The
village is so long that although full night buried us in it we saw its
last buildings beginning to pale in the frost of dawn. Through the
grating of a cellar on the edge of this petrified ocean's waves, we
made out the fire kept going by the custodians of the dead town. We
have paddled in swampy fields, lost ourselves in silent places where
the mud seized us by the feet, we have dubiously regained our balance
and our bearings again on another road, the one which leads from
Carency to Souchez. The tall bordering poplars are shivered and their
trunks mangled; in one place the road is an enormous colonnade of trees
destroyed. Then, marching with us on both sides, we see through the
shadows ghostly dwarfs of trees, wide-cloven like spreading palms;
botched and jumbled into round blocks or long strips; doubled upon
themselves, as if they knelt. From time to time our march is disordered
and bustled by the yielding of a swamp. The road becomes a marsh which
we cross on our heels, while our feet make the sound of sculling.
Planks have been laid in it here and there. Where they have so far sunk
in the mud as to proffer their edges to us we slip on them. Sometimes
there is enough water to float them, and then under the weight of a man
they splash and go under, and the man stumbles or falls, with frenzied
imprecations.

It must be five o'clock. The stark and affrighting scene unfolds itself
to our eyes, but it is still encircled by a great fantastic ring of
mist and of darkness. We go on and on without pause, and come to a
place where we can make out a dark hillock, at the foot of which there
seems to be some lively movement of human beings.

"Advance by twos," says the leader of the detachment. "Let each team of
two take alternately a plank and a hurdle." We load ourselves up. One
of the two in each couple assumes the rifle of his partner as well as
his own. The other with difficulty shifts and pulls out from the pile a
long plank, muddy and slippery, which weighs full eighty pounds, or a
hurdle of leafy branches as big as a door, which he can only just keep
on his back as he bends forward with his hands aloft and grips its
edges.

We resume our march, very slowly and very ponderously, scattered over
the now gra