well as may be, supporting and crushing
each other. The topmost is wrapped in a tent-cloth. Handkerchiefs had
been placed on the faces of the others; but in brushing against them in
the dark without seeing them, or even in the daytime without noticing
them, the handkerchiefs have fallen, and we are living face to face
with these dead, heaped up there like a wood-pile.

* * * * *

It was four nights ago that they were all killed together. I remember
the night myself indistinctly--it is like a dream. We were on
patrol--they, I, Mesnil Andre, and Corporal Bertrand; and our business
was to identify a new German listening-post marked by the artillery
observers. We left the trench towards midnight and crept down the slope
in line, three or four paces from each other. Thus we descended far
into the ravine, and saw, lying before our eyes, the embankment of
their International Trench. After we had verified that there was no
listening-post in this slice of the ground we climbed back, with
infinite care. Dimly I saw my neighbors to right and left, like sacks
of shadow, crawling, slowly sliding, undulating and rocking in the mud
and the murk, with the projecting needle in front of a rifle. Some
bullets whistled above us, but they did not know we were there, they
were not looking for us. When we got within sight of the mound of our
line, we took a breather for a moment; one of us let a sigh go, another
spoke. Another turned round bodily, and the sheath of his bayonet rang
out against a stone. Instantly a rocket shot redly up from the
International Trench. We threw ourselves flat on the ground, closely,
desperately, and waited there motionless, with the terrible star
hanging over us and flooding us with daylight, twenty-five or thirty
yards from our trench. Then a machine-gun on the other side of the
ravine swept the zone where we were. Corporal Bertrand and I had had
the luck to find in front of us, just as the red rocket went up and
before it burst into light, a shell-hole, where a broken trestle was
steeped in the mud. We flattened ourselves against the edge of the
hole, buried ourselves in the mud as much as possible, and the poor
skeleton of rotten wood concealed us. The jet of the machine-gun
crossed several times. We heard a piercing whistle in the middle of
each report, the sharp and violent sound of bullets that went into the
earth, and dull and soft blows as well, followed by groans, by a little