rumpled and stiff, and puts it back in his pocket. A cold drizzle is
falling, and everybody shivers.

Down yonder we hear a droning chant--"Two shovels, one pick, two
shovels, one pick----" The file trickles along to the tool-store,
stagnates at the door, and departs, bristling with implements.

"Everybody here? Gee up!" says the sergeant. Downward and rolling, we
go forward. We know not where we go. We know nothing, except that the
night and the earth are blending in the same abyss.

As we emerge into the nude twilight from the trench, we see it already
black as the crater of a dead volcano. Great gray clouds,
storm-charged, hang from the sky. The plain, too, is gray in the pallid
light; the grass is muddy, and all slashed with water. The things which
here and there seem only distorted limbs are denuded trees. We cannot
see far around us in the damp reek; besides, we only look downwards at
the mud in which we slide--"Porridge!"

Going across country we knead and pound a sticky paste which spreads
out and flows back from every step--"Chocolate cream--coffee creams!"

On the stony parts, the wiped-out ruins of roads that have become
barren as the fields, the marching troop breaks through a layer of
slime into a flinty conglomerate that grates and gives way under our
iron-shod soles--"Seems as if we were walking on buttered toast!"

On the slope of a knoll sometimes, the mud is black and thick and
deep-rutted, like that which forms around the horse-ponds in villages,
and in these ruts there are lakes and puddles and ponds, whose edges
seem to be in rags.

The pleasantries of the wags, who in the early freshness of the journey
had cried, "Quack, quack," when they went through the water, are now
becoming rare and gloomy; gradually the jokers are damped down. The
rain begins to fall heavily. The daylight dwindles, and the confusion
that is space contracts. The last lingering light welters on the ground
and in the water.

A steaming silhouette of men like monks appears through the rain in the
west. It is a company of the 204th, wrapped in tent-cloths. As we go by
we see the pale and shrunken faces and the dark noses of these dripping
prowlers before they disappear. The track we are following through the
faint grass of the fields is itself a sticky field streaked with
countless parallel ruts, all plowed in the same line by the feet and
the wheels of those who go to the front and those who go to the rear.

We have t