an immense stain on the world.
It is the returning morning.

It is so cold that we cannot stand still in spite of our fettering
fatigue. We tremble and shiver and shed tears, and our teeth chatter.
Little by little, with dispiriting tardiness, day escapes from the sky
into the slender framework of the black clouds. All is frozen,
colorless and empty; a deathly silence reigns everywhere. There is rime
and snow under a burden of mist. Everything is white. Paradis moves--a
heavy pallid ghost, for we two also are all white. I had placed my
shoulder-bag on the other side of the parapet, and it looks as if
wrapped in paper. In the bottom of the hole a little snow floats,
fretted and gray in the black foot-bath. Outside the hole, on the
piled-up things, in the excavations, upon the crowded dead, snow rests
like muslin.

Two stooping protuberant masses are crayoned on the mist; they grow
darker as they approach and hail us. They are the men who come to
relieve us. Their faces are ruddy and tearful with cold, their
cheek-bones like enameled tiles; but their greatcoats are not
snow-powdered, for they have slept underground.

Paradis hoists himself out. Over the plain I follow his Father
Christmas back and the duck-like waddle of the boots that pick up
white-felted soles. Bending deeply forward we regain the trench; the
footsteps of those who replaced us are marked in black on the scanty
whiteness that covers the ground.

Watchers are standing at intervals in the trench, over which tarpaulins
are stretched on posts here and there, figured in white velvet or
mottled with rime, and forming great irregular tents; and between the
watchers are squatting forms who grumble and try to fight against the
cold, to exclude it from the meager fireside of their own chests, or
who are simply frozen. A dead man has slid down, upright and hardly
askew, with his feet in the trench and his chest and arms resting on
the bank. He was clasping the earth when life left him. His face is
turned skyward and is covered with a leprosy of ice, the eyelids are
white as the eyes, the mustache caked with hard slime. Other bodies are
sleeping, less white than that one; the snowy stratum is only intact on
lifeless things.

"We must sleep." Paradis and I are looking for shelter, a hole where we
may hide ourselves and shut our eyes. "It can't be helped if there are
stiffs in the dugouts," mutters Paradis; "in a cold like this they'll
keep, they won't be too