e things, no man using more than his hands.

The man next me was equipping himself to go on sentry duty. He was in
no hurry. He filled his pipe, drew from his pocket a tinder-lighter as
long as a tapeworm, and said to me, "You're not going on again till six
o'clock. Ah, you're very lucky!"

Diligently he mingled his heavy tobacco-clouds with the vapors from all
those bodies which lay around us and rattled in their throats.
Kneeling at my feet to arrange his things, he gave me some advice, "No
need to get a hump, mind. Nothing ever happens here. Getting here's
by far the worst. On that job you get it hot, specially when you've
the bad luck to be sleepy, or it's not raining, but after that you're a
workman, and you forget about it. The most worst, it's the open
crossing. But nobody I know's ever stopped one there. It was other
blokes. It's been like this for two months, old man, and we'll be able
to say we've been through the war without a chilblain, we shall."

At dawn I resumed my lookout at the loophole. Quite near, on the slope
of the little wood, the bushes and the bare branches are broidered with
drops of water. In front, under the fatal space where the eternal
passage of projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, the
field resembles a field, the road resembles a road. Ultimately one
makes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpse
in a field--a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades of
grass disguise! At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and it
resembled the past.

Thus went the days by, the weeks and the months; four days in the front
line, the harassing journey to and from it, the monotonous sentry-go,
the spy-hole on the plain, the mesmerism of the empty outlook and of
the deserts of waiting; and after that, four days of rest-camp full of
marches and parades and great cleansings of implements and of streets,
with regulations of the strictest, anticipating all the different
occasions for punishment, a thousand fatigues, each with as many harsh
knocks, the litany of optimist phrases, abstruse and utopian, in the
orders of the day, and a captain who chiefly concerned himself with the
two hundred cartridges and the reserve rations. The regiment had no
losses, or almost none; a few wounds during reliefs, and sometimes one
or two deaths which were announced like accidents. We only underwent
great weariness, which goes away as fast as it comes. T