lled up, where the defile shrunk into strangulation by the
sudden wedging of our pouches. It seemed as if the earth tried
continually to clasp and choke us, that sometimes it roughly struck us.
Above the unknown plains in which we were hiding, space was
shot-riddled. A few star-shells were softly whitening some sections of
the night, revealing the excavations' wet entrails and conjuring up a
file of heavy shadows, borne down by lofty burdens, tramping in a black
and black-bunged impasse, and jolting against the eddies. When great
guns were discharged all the vault of heaven was lighted and lifted and
then fell darkly back.

"Look out! The open crossing!"

A wall of earth rose in tiers before us. There was no outlet. The
trench came to a sudden end--to be resumed farther on, it seemed.

"Why?" I asked, mechanically.

They explained to me: "It's like that." And they added, "You stoop
down and get a move on."

The men climbed the soft steps with bent heads, made their rush one by
one and ran hard into the belt whose only remaining defense was the
dark. The thunder of shrapnel that shattered and dazzled the air here
and there showed me too frightfully how fragile we all were. In spite
of the fatigue clinging to my limbs, I sprang forward in my turn with
all my strength, fiercely pursuing the signs of an overloaded and
rattling body which ran in front; and I found myself again in a trench,
breathless. In my passage I had glimpses of a somber field,
bullet-smacked and hole pierced, with silent blots outspread or
doubled, and a litter of crosses and posts, as black and fantastic as
tall torches extinguished, all under a firmament where day and night
immensely fought.

"I believe I saw some corpses," I said to him who marched in front of
me; and there was a break in my voice.

"_You've_ just left your village," he replied; "you bet there's some
stiffs about here!"

I laughed also, in the delight of having got past. We began again to
march one behind another, swaying about, hustled by the narrowness of
this furrow they had scooped to the ancient depth of a grave, panting
under the load, dragged towards the earth by the earth and pushed
forward by will-power, under a sky shrilling with the dizzy flight of
bullets, tiger-striped with red, and in some seconds saturated with
light. At forks in the way we turned sometimes right and sometimes
left, all touching each other, the whole huge body of the company
fle