nly from the
night but from the sea.

Drowsy or half asleep, sometimes opening our eyes only to close them
again, we attend the incredible renewal of light, paralyzed with cold
and broken with fatigue.

Where are the trenches?

We see lakes, and between the lakes there are lines of milky and
motionless water. There is more water even than we had thought. It has
taken everything and spread everywhere, and the prophecy of the men in
the night has come true. There are no more trenches; those canals are
the trenches enshrouded. It is a universal flood. The battlefield is
not sleeping; it is dead. Life may be going on down yonder perhaps, but
we cannot see so far.

Swaying painfully, like a sick man, in the terrible encumbering clasp
of my greatcoat, I half raise myself to look at it all. There are three
monstrously shapeless forms beside me. One of them--it is Paradis, in
an amazing armor of mud, with a swelling at the waist that stands for
his cartridge pouches--gets up also. The others are asleep, and make no
movement.

And what is this silence, too, this prodigious silence? There is no
sound, except when from time to time a lump of earth slips into the
water, in the middle of this fantastic paralysis of the world. No one
is firing. There are no shells, for they would not burst. There are no
bullets, either, for the men--

Ah, the men! Where are the men?

We see them gradually. Not far from us there are some stranded and
sleeping hulks so molded in mud from head to foot that they are almost
transformed into inanimate objects.

Some distance away I can make out others, curled up and clinging like
snails all along a rounded embankment, from which they have partly
slipped back into the water. It is a motionless rank of clumsy lumps,
of bundles placed side by side, dripping water and mud, and of the same
color as the soil with which they are blended.

I make an effort to break the silence. To Paradis, who also is looking
that way, I say, "Are they dead?"

"We'll go and see presently," he says in a low voice; "stop here a bit
yet. We shall have the heart to go there by and by."

We look at each other, and our eyes fall also on the others who came
and fell down here. Their faces spell such weariness that they are no
longer faces so much as something dirty, disfigured and bruised, with
blood-shot eyes. Since the beginning we have seen each other in all
manner of shapes and appearances, and yet--we do not know each