, along the dark
and ruined mole.

* * * * *

And suddenly one feels that it is over. We see and hear and understand
that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has not
encountered an equal breaker. They have fallen back on our approach.
The battle has dissolved in front of us. The slender curtain of
defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are caught like rats
or killed. There is no more resistance, but a void, a great void. We
advance in crowds like a terrible array of spectators.

And here the trench seems all lightning-struck. With its tumbled white
walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a vanished river
that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the flat round hole of
a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the sloping banks and in
the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of corpses--a dead river
that is filled again to overflowing by the new tide and the breaking
wave of our company. In the smoke vomited by dug-outs and the shaking
wind of subterranean explosions, I come upon a compact mass of men
hooked onto each other who are describing a wide circle. Just as we
reach them the entire mass breaks up to make a residue of furious
battle. I see Blaire break away, his helmet hanging on his neck by the
chin-strap and his face flayed, and uttering a savage yell. I stumble
upon a man who is crouching at the entry to a dug-out. Drawing back
from the black hatchway, yawning and treacherous, he steadies himself
with his left hand on a beam. In his right hand and for several seconds
he holds a bomb which is on the point of exploding. It disappears in
the hole, bursts immediately, and a horrible human echo answers him
from the bowels of the earth. The man seizes another bomb.

Another man strikes and shatters the posts at the mouth of another
dug-out with a pickax he has found there, causing a landslide, and the
entry is blocked. I see several shadows trampling and gesticulating
over the tomb.

Of the living ragged band that has got so far and has reached this
long-sought trench after dashing against the storm of invincible shells
and bullets launched to meet them, I can hardly recognize those whom I
know, just as though all that had gone before of our lives had suddenly
become very distant. There is some change working in them. A frenzied
excitement is driving them all out of themselves.

"What are we stopping here for?" says one, grinding his t