our company has uncertainly wandered since the morning. I
saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind seemed to be
driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places by a more
pointed billow of smoke.

Where the sun and the clouds trail patches of black and of white, the
immense space sparkles dully from point to point where our batteries
are firing, and I saw it one moment entirely spangled with short-lived
flashes. Another minute, part of the field grew dark under a steamy and
whitish film, a sort of hurricane of snow.

Afar, on the evil, endless, and half-ruined fields, caverned like
cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of torn
paper; and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim rows of
vertical marks, close together and underlined, like the straight
strokes of a written page--these are the roads and their trees.
Delicate meandering lines streak the plain backward and forward and
rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with men.

We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human points
who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on the plain
in the horrible face of the flying firmament. It is difficult to
believe that each of those tiny spots is a living thing with fragile
and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, full of deep
thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures. One is fascinated
by this scattered dust of men as small as the stars in the sky.

Poor unknowns, poor fellow-men, it is your turn to give battle. Another
time it will be ours. Perhaps to-morrow it will be ours to feel the
heavens burst over our heads or the earth open under our feet, to be
assailed by the prodigious plague of projectiles, to be swept away by
the blasts of a tornado a hundred thousand times stronger than the
tornado.

They urge us into the rearward shelters. For our eyes the field of
death vanishes. To our ears the thunder is deadened on the great anvil
of the clouds. The sound of universal destruction is still. The squad
surrounds itself with the familiar noises of life, and sinks into the
fondling littleness of the dug-outs.

------------

[note 1] Military slang for machine-gun--Tr.

XX

Under Fire

RUDELY awakened in the dark, I open my eyes: "What? What's up?"

"Your turn on guard--it's two o'clock in the morning," says Corporal
Bertrand at the opening into the hole where I am prostrate on the
floor.