stickiness, pearl-gray and white,
covers the road, and around it the real world makes a mournful
appearance. Behind us we leave ruined Souchez, whose houses are only
flat heaps of rubbish and her trees but humps of bramble-like slivers.
We plunge into a hole on our left, the entrance to the communication
trench. We let our loads fall in a circular enclosure prepared for
them, and both hot and frozen we settled in the trench and wait our
hands abraded, wet, and stiff with cramp.

Buried in our holes up to the chin, our chests heaving against the
solid bulk of the ground that protects us, we watch the dazzling and
deepening drama develop. The bombardment is redoubled. The trees of
light on the ridge have melted into hazy parachutes in the pallor of
dawn, sickly heads of Medusae with points of fire; then, more sharply
defined as the day expands, they become bunches of smoke-feathers,
ostrich feathers white and gray, which come suddenly to life on the
jumbled and melancholy soil of Hill 119, five or six hundred yards in
front of us, and then slowly fade away. They are truly the pillar of
fire and the pillar of cloud, circling as one and thundering together.
On the flank of the bill we see a party of men running to earth. One by
one they disappear, swallowed up in the adjoining anthills.

Now, one can better make out the form of our "guests." At each shot a
tuft of sulphurous white underlined in black forms sixty yards up in
the air, unfolds and mottles itself, and we catch in the explosion the
whistling of the charge of bullets that the yellow cloud hurls angrily
to the ground. It bursts in sixfold squalls, one after another--bang,
bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. It is the 77 mm. gun.

We disdain the 77 mm. shrapnel, in spite of the fact that Blesbois was
killed by one of them three days ago. They nearly always burst too
high. Barque explains it to us, although we know it well: "One's
chamber-pot protects one's nut well enough against the bullets. So they
can destroy your shoulder and damn well knock you down, but they don't
spread you about. Naturally, you've got to be fly, all the same. Got to
be careful you don't lift your neb in the air as long as they're
buzzing about, nor put your hand out to see if it's raining. Now, our
75 mm.--"

"There aren't only the 77's," Mesnil Andre broke in, "there's all
damned sorts. Spell those out for me--" Those are shrill and cutting
whistles, trembling or rattling; and clouds of all