"It's shameful."
Then they add, "It's true they can't be taken away from there." And
they were only buried in the night.

Morning has come. Opposite us we see the other slope of the ravine,
Hill 119, an eminence scraped, stripped, and scratched, veined with
shaken trenches and lined with parallel cuttings that vividly reveal
the clay and the chalky soil. Nothing is stirring there; and our shells
that burst in places with wide spouts of foam like huge billows seem to
deliver their resounding blows upon a great breakwater, ruined and
abandoned.

My spell of vigil is finished, and the other sentinels, enveloped in
damp and trickling tent-cloths, with their stripes and plasters of mud
and their livid jaws, disengage themselves from the soil wherein they
are molded, bestir themselves, and come down. For us, it is rest until
evening.

We yawn and stroll. We see a comrade pass and then another. Officers go
to and fro, armed with periscopes and telescopes. We feel our feet
again, and begin once more to live. The customary remarks cross and
clash; and were it not for the dilapidated outlook, the sunken lines of
the trench that buries us on the hillside, and the veto on our voices,
we might fancy ourselves in the rear lines. But lassitude weighs upon
all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the eyelids reddened; through
long watching we look as if we had been weeping. For several days now
we have all of us been sagging and growing old.

One after another the men of my squad have made a confluence at a curve
in the trench. They pile themselves where the soil is only chalky, and
where, above the crust that bristles with severed roots, the
excavations have exposed some beds of white stones that had lain in the
darkness for over a hundred thousand years.

There in the widened fairway, Bertrand's squad beaches itself. It is
much reduced this time, for beyond the losses of the other night, we no
longer have Poterloo, killed in a relief, nor Cadilhac, wounded in the
leg by a splinter the same evening as Poterloo, nor Tirioir nor
Tulacque who have been sent back, the one for dysentery, and the other
for pneumonia, which is taking an ugly turn--as he says in the
postcards which he sends us as a pastime from the base hospital where
he is vegetating.

Once more I see gathered and grouped, soiled by contact with the earth
and dirty smoke, the familiar faces and poses of those who have not
been separated since the beginning, chained and