umination up above--a rocket. The scene in which I
am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me. The crest of
our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see, stuck to
the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars, the shadows
of the watchers. Their rifles are revealed beside them by a few spots
of light. The trench is shored with sandbags. It is widened everywhere,
and in many places ripped up by landslides. The sandbags, piled up and
dislodged, appear in the starlike light of the rocket like the great
dismantled stones of ancient ruined buildings. I look through the
loophole, and discern in the misty and pallid atmosphere expanded by
the meteor the rows of stakes and even the thin lines of barbed wire
which cross and recross between the posts. To my seeing they are like
strokes of a pen scratched upon the pale and perforated ground. Lower
down, the ravine is filled with the motionless silence of the ocean of
night.

I come down from my look-out and steer at a guess towards my neighbor
in vigil, and come upon him with outstretched hand. "Is that you?" I
say to him in a subdued voice, though I don't know him.

"Yes," he replies, equally ignorant who I am, blind like myself. "It's
quiet at this time," he adds "A bit since I thought they were going to
attack, and they may have tried it on, on the right, where they chucked
over a lot of bombs. There's been a barrage of 75's--vrrrran,
vrrrran--Old man, I said to myself, 'Those 75's, p'raps they've good
reason for firing. If they did come out, the Boches, they must have
found something.' Tiens, listen, down there, the bullets buffing
themselves!"

He opens his flask and takes a draught, and his last words, still
subdued, smell of wine: "Ah, la, la! Talk about a filthy war! Don't you
think we should be a lot better at home!--Hullo! What's the matter with
the ass?" A rifle has rung out beside us, making a brief and sudden
flash of phosphorescence. Others go off here and there along our line.
Rifle-shots are catching after dark.

We go to inquire of one of the shooters, guessing our way through the
solid blackness that has fallen again upon us like a roof. Stumbling,
and thrown anon on each other, we reach the man and touch him--"Well,
what's up?"

He thought he saw something moving, but there is nothing more. We
return through the density, my unknown neighbor and I, unsteady, and
laboring along the narrow way of slippery mud, doubled u