not be far away,
for it had brought us here. But which way must we steer to find it?

The rain redoubled. We lingered a moment in mournful disappointment,
gathered on a lightning-smitten and unknown shore--and then the
stampede.

Some bore to the left, some to the right, some went straight
forward--tiny groups that one only saw for a second in the heart of the
thundering rain before they were separated by sable avalanches and
curtains of flaming smoke.

* * * * *

The bombardment over our heads grew less; it was chiefly over the place
where we had been that it was increasing. But it might any minute
isolate everything and destroy it.

The rain became more and more torrential--a deluge in the night. The
darkness was so deep that the star-shells only lit up slices of
water-seamed obscurity, in the depths of which fleeing phantoms came
and went and ran round in circles.

I cannot say how long I wandered with the group with which I had
remained. We went into morasses. We strained our sight forward in quest
of the embankment and the trench of salvation, towards the ditch that
was somewhere there, as towards a harbor.

A cry of consolation was heard at last through the vapors of war and
the elements--"A trench!" But the embankment of that trench was moving;
it was made of men mingled in confusion, who seemed to be coming out
and abandoning it.

"Don't stay there, mates!" cried the fugitives; "clear off, don't come
near. It's hell--everything's collapsing--the trenches are legging it
and the dug-outs are bunged up--the mud's pouring in everywhere. There
won't be any trenches by the morning--it's all up with them about here!"

They disappeared. Where? We forgot to ask for some little direction
from these men whose streaming shapes had no sooner appeared than they
were swallowed up in the dark.

Even our little group crumbled away among the devastation, no longer
knowing where they were. Now one, now another, faded into the night,
disappearing towards his chance of escape.

We climbed slopes and descended them. I saw dimly in front of me men
bowed and hunchbacked, mounting a slippery incline where mud held them
back, and the wind and rain repelled them under a dome of cloudy lights.

Then we flowed back, and plunged into a marsh up to our knees. So high
must we lift our feet that we walked with a sound of swimming. Each
forward stride was an enormous effort which slackened in agony.

It