visible in the night, but at the exit
from the hole we see a disorder of beams which flounder in the widened
trench--some demolished dugout.

Just at this moment, a searchlight's unearthly arm that was swinging
through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of
uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with dead
soldiers. Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs on its
back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with clotted drops,
covers the cheek. Another body so clasps a post in its arms that it has
only half fallen. Another, lying in the form of a circle, has been
stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are laid bare. Another,
outstretched on the edge of the heap, has thrown his hand across our
path; and in this place where there no traffic except by night--for the
trench is blocked just there by the earth-fall and inaccessible by
day--every one treads on that hand. By the searchlight's shaft I saw it
clearly, fleshless and worn, a sort of withered fin.

The rain is raging and the sound of its streaming dominates
everything--a horror of desolation. We feel the water on our flesh as
if the deluge had washed our clothes away.

We enter the open trench, and the embrace of night and storm resumes
the sole possession of this confusion of corpses, stranded and cramped
on a square of earth as on a raft.

The wind freezes the drops of sweat on our foreheads. It is near
midnight. For six hours now we have marched in the increasing burden of
the mud. This is the time when the Paris theaters are constellated with
electroliers and blossoming with lamps; when they are filled with
luxurious excitement, with the rustle of skirts, with merrymaking and
warmth; when a fragrant and radiant multitude, chatting, laughing,
smiling, applauding, expanding, feels itself pleasantly affected by the
cleverly graduated emotions which the comedy evokes, and lolls in
contented enjoyment of the rich and splendid pageants of military
glorification that crowd the stage of the music-hall.

"Aren't we there? Nom de Dieu, shan't we ever get there?" The groan is
breathed by the long procession that tosses about in these crevices of
the earth, carrying rifles and shovels and pickaxes under the eternal
torrent. We march and march. We are drunk with fatigue, and roll to
this side and that. Stupefied and soaked, we strike with our shoulders
a substance as sodden as ourselves.

"Halt!"--"Are