e we going? No one knew. We crossed the rest of the village.
The Germans had occupied it during the August retreat. It was
destroyed, and the destruction was beginning to live, to cover itself
with fresh wreckage and dung, to smoke and consume itself. The rain
had ceased in melancholy. Up aloft in the clearings of the sky,
clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and the
detonations reached us, far and fine. Along the sodden road we met Red
Cross motor ambulances, rushing on rails of mud, but we could not see
inside them. In the first stages we were interested in everything, and
asked questions, like foreigners. A man who had been wounded and was
rejoining the regiment with us answered us from time to time, and
invariably added, "That's nothing; you'll see in a bit." Then the
march made men retire into themselves.

My knapsack, so ingeniously compact; my cartridge-bags so ferociously
full; my round pouches with their keen-edged straps, all jostled and
then wounded my back at each step. The pain quickly became acute,
unbearable. I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spite
of the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive at
the end of the fifty minutes' march. But I did all the same, because I
had no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, and
because I could thus always _do one step more_. I knew later that this
is nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldiers
completing superhuman physical efforts to the very end.

The cold blast benumbed us, while we dragged ourselves through the
softened plains which evening was darkening. At one halt I saw one of
those men who used to agitate at the depot to be sent to the front. He
had sunk down at the foot of the stacked rifles; exertion had made him
almost unrecognizable, and he told me that he had had enough of war!
And little Melusson, whom I once used to see at Viviers, lifted to me
his yellowish face, sweat-soaked, where the folds of the eyelids seemed
drawn with red crayon, and informed me that he should report sick the
next day.

After four marches of despairing length under a lightless sky over a
colorless earth, we stood for two hours, hot and damp, at the chilly
top of a hill, where a village was beginning. An epidemic of gloom
overspread us. Why were we stopped in that way? No one knew anything.

In the evening we engulfed ourselves in the village. But they halted
us