not room enough either to descend or climb out. As you go on burying
yourself in the gulf, the nightmare of suffocation continues that you
progressively endured as you advanced along the bowels of the trenches
before foundering in here. On all sides you bump and scrape yourself,
you are clutched by the tightness of the passage, you are wedged and
stuck. I have to change the position of my cartridge pouches by sliding
them round the belt and to take my bags in my arms against my chest. At
the fourth step the suffocation increases still more and one has a
moment of agony; little as one may lift his knee for the rearward step,
his back strikes the roof. In this spot it is necessary to go on all
fours, still backwards. As you go down into the depth, a pestilent
atmosphere and heavy as earth buries you. Your hands touch only the
cold, sticky and sepulchral clay of the wall, which bears you down on
all sides and enshrouds you in a dismal solitude; its blind and moldy
breath touches your face. On the last steps, reached after long labor,
one is assailed by a hot, unearthly clamor that rises from the hole as
from a sort of kitchen.

When you reach at last the bottom of this laddered sap that elbows and
compresses you at every step, the evil dream is not ended, for you find
yourself in a lone but very narrow cavern where gloom reigns, a mere
corridor not more than five feet high. If you cease to stoop and to
walk with bended knees, your head violently strikes the planks that
roof the Refuge, and the newcomers are heard to growl--more or less
forcefully, according to their temper and condition--"Ah, lucky I've
got my tin hat on:"

One makes out the gesture of some one who is squatting in an angle. It
is an ambulance man on guard, whose monotone says to each arrival,
"Take the mud off your boots before going in." So you stumble into an
accumulating pile of mud; it entangles you at the foot of the steps on
this threshold of hell.

In the hubbub of lamentation and groaning, in the strong smell of a
countless concentration of wounds, in this blinking cavern of confused
and unintelligible life, I try first to get my bearings. Some weak
candle flames are shining along the Refuge, but they only relieve the
darkness in the spots where they pierce it. At the farthest end faint
daylight appears, as it might to a dungeon prisoner at the bottom of an
oubliette. This obscure vent-hole allows one to make out some big
objects ranged along