there by the left, making a detour. No one there.
I only meet another of our squad on the same errand--Paradis.

We are bustled by men who are carrying on their shoulders pieces of
iron of all shapes. They block up the trench and separate us. "The
machine-gun's taken by the 7th," they shout, "it won't bark any more.
It was a mad devil--filthy beast! Filthy beast!"

"What's there to do now?"--"Nothing."

We stay there, jumbled together, and sit down. The living have ceased
to gasp for breath, the dying have rattled their last, surrounded by
smoke and lights and the din of the guns that rolls to all the ends of
the earth. We no longer know where we are. There is neither earth nor
sky--nothing but a sort of cloud. The first period of inaction is
forming in the chaotic drama, and there is a general slackening in the
movement and the uproar. The cannonade grows less; it still shakes the
sky as a cough shakes a man, but it is farther off now. Enthusiasm is
allayed, and there remains only the infinite fatigue that rises and
overwhelms us, and the infinite waiting that begins over again.

* * * * *

Where is the enemy? He has left his dead everywhere, and we have seen
rows of prisoners. Yonder again there is one, drab, ill-defined and
smoky, outlined against the dirty sky. But the bulk seem to have
dispersed afar. A few shells come to us here and there blunderingly,
and we ridicule them. We are saved, we are quiet, we are alone, in this
desert where an immensity of corpses adjoins a line of the living.

Night has come. The dust has flown away, but has yielded place to
shadow and darkness over the long-drawn multitude's disorder. Men
approach each other, sit down, get up again and walk about, leaning on
each other or hooked together. Between the dug-outs, which are blocked
by the mingled dead, we gather in groups and squat. Some have laid
their rifles on the ground and wander on the rim of the trench with
their arms balancing; and when they come near we can see that they are
blackened and scorched, their eyes are red and slashed with mud. We
speak seldom, but are beginning to think.

We see the stretcher-bearers, whose sharp silhouettes stoop and grope;
they advance linked two and two together by their long burdens. Yonder
on our right one hears the blows of pick and shovel.

I wander into the middle of this gloomy turmoil. In a place where the
embankment has crushed the embankment of the trenc