p as if we each
carried a crushing burden. At one point of the horizon and then at
another all around, a gun sounds, and its heavy din blends with the
volleys of rifle-fire, redoubled one minute and dying out the next, and
with the clusters of grenade-reports, of deeper sound than the crack of
Lebel or Mauser, and nearly like the voice of the old classical rifles.
The wind has again increased; it is so strong that one must protect
himself against it in the darkness; masses of huge cloud are passing in
front of the moon.

So there we are, this man and I, jostling without knowing each other,
revealed and then hidden from each other in sudden jerks by the flashes
of the guns, oppressed by the opacity, the center of a huge circle of
fires that appear and disappear in the devilish landscape.

"We're under a curse," says the man.

We separate, and go each to his own loophole, to weary our eyes upon
invisibility. Is some frightful and dismal storm about to break? But
that night it did not. At the end of my long wait, with the first
streaks of day, there was even a lull.

Again I saw, when the dawn came down on us like a stormy evening, the
steep banks of our crumbling trench as they came to life again under
the sooty scarf of the low-hanging clouds, a trench dismal and dirty,
infinitely dirty, humped with debris and filthiness. Under the livid
sky the sandbags are taking the same hue, and their vaguely shining and
rounded shapes are like the bowels and viscera of giants, nakedly
exposed upon the earth.

In the trench-wall behind me, in a hollowed recess, there is a heap of
horizontal things like logs. Tree-trunks? No, they are corpses.

* * * * *

As the call of birds goes up from the furrowed ground, as the shadowy
fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each blade of
grass, I look towards the ravine. Below the quickening field and its
high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the bristling of
stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and in front of the
opposite slope a wall of night still stands.

Then I turn again and look upon these dead men whom the day is
gradually exhuming, revealing their stained and stiffened forms. There
are four of them. They are our comrades, Lamuse, Barque, Biquet, and
little Eudore. They rot there quite near us, blocking one half of the
wide, twisting, and muddy furrow that the living must still defend.

They have been laid there as