pace. "When one speaks of the whole war," he said, thinking
aloud, "it's as if you said nothing at all--the words are strangled.
We're here, and we look at it all like blind men."

A bass voice rolled to us from a little farther away, "No, one cannot
imagine it."

At these words a burst of harsh laughter tore itself from some one.
"How could you imagine it, to begin with, if you hadn't been there?"

"You'd have to be mad," said the chasseur.

Paradis leaned over a sprawling outspread mass beside him and said,
"Are you asleep?"

"No, but I'm not going to budge." The smothered and terror-struck
mutter issued instantly from the mass that was covered with a thick and
slimy horse-cloth, so indented that it seemed to have been trampled.
"I'll tell you why. I believe my belly's shot through. But I'm not
sure, and I daren't find out."

"Let's see--"

"No, not yet," says the man. "I'd rather stop on a bit like this."

The others, dragging themselves on their elbows, began to make
splashing movements, by way of casting off the clammy infernal covering
that weighed them down. The paralysis of cold was passing away from the
knot of sufferers, though the light no longer made any progress over
the great irregular marsh of the lower plain. The desolation proceeded,
but not the day.

Then he who spoke sorrowfully, like a bell, said. "It'll be no good
telling about it, eh? They wouldn't believe you; not out of malice or
through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn't. When you
say to 'em later, if you live to say it, 'We were on a night job and we
got shelled and we were very nearly drowned in mud,' they'll say, 'Ah!'
And p'raps they'll say. 'You didn't have a very spicy time on the job.'
And that's all. No one can know it. Only us."

"No, not even us, not even us!" some one cried.

"That's what I say, too. We shall forget--we're forgetting already, my
boy!"

"We've seen too much to remember."

"And everything we've seen was too much. We're not made to hold it all.
It takes its damned hook in all directions. We're too little to hold
it."

"You're right, we shall forget! Not only the length of the big misery,
which can't be calculated, as you say, ever since the beginning, but
the marches that turn up the ground and turn it again, lacerating your
feet and wearing out your bones under a load that seems to grow bigger
in the sky, the exhaustion until you don't know your own name any more,
the tramping and the