eeth.

"Why don't we go on to the next?" a second asks me in fury. "Now we're
here, we'd be there in a few jumps!'

"I, too, I want to go on."--"Me, too. Ah, the hogs!" They shake
themselves like banners. They carry the luck of their survival as it
were glory; they are implacable, uncontrolled, intoxicated with
themselves.

We wait and stamp about in the captured work, this strange demolished
way that winds along the plain and goes from the unknown to the unknown.

Advance to the right!

We begin to flow again in one direction. No doubt it is a movement
planned up there, back yonder, by the chiefs. We trample soft bodies
underfoot, some of which are moving and slowly altering their position;
rivulets and cries come from them. Like posts and heaps of rubbish,
corpses are piled anyhow on the wounded, and press them down, suffocate
them, strangle them. So that I can get by, I must push at a slaughtered
trunk of which the neck is a spring of gurgling blood.

In the cataclysm of earth and of massive wreckage blown up and blown
out, above the hordes of wounded and dead that stir together, athwart
the moving forest of smoke implanted in the trench and in all its
environs, one no longer sees any face but what is inflamed, blood-red
with sweat, eyes flashing. Some groups seem to be dancing as they
brandish their knives. They are elated, immensely confident, ferocious.

The battle dies down imperceptibly. A soldier says, "Well, what's to be
done now?" ft flares up again suddenly at one point. Twenty yards away
in the plain, in the direction of a circle that the gray embankment
makes, a cluster of rifle-shots crackles and hurls its scattered
missiles around a hidden machine-gun, that spits intermittently and
seems to be in difficulties.

Under the shadowy wing of a sort of yellow and bluish nimbus I see men
encircling the flashing machine and closing in on it. Near to me I make
out the silhouette of Mesnil Joseph, who is steering straight and with
no effort of concealment for the spot whence the barking explosions
come in jerky sequence.

A flash shoots out from a corner of the trench between us two. Joseph
halts, sways, stoops, and drops on one knee. I run to him and he
watches me coming. "It's nothing--my thigh. I can crawl along by
myself." He seems to have become quiet, childish, docile; and sways
slowly towards the trench.

I have still in my eyes the exact spot whence rang the shot that hit
him, and I slip round