steel are drowned in all that life;
it closes up and re-forms like the sea.

"Rapid fire!"

We fire desperately. But we have not many cartridges. Since we came
into the first line they have ceased to inspect our load of ammunition;
and many men, especially these last days, have got rid of a part of the
burden which bruises hips and belly and tears away the skin. They who
are coming do not fire; and above the long burning thicket of our line
one can see them still flowing from the east. They are closely massed
in ranks. One would say they clung to each other as though welded.
They are not using their rifles. Their only weapon is the infinity of
their number. They are coming to bury us under their feet.

Suddenly a shift in the wind brings us the smell of ether. The
divisions advancing on us are drunk! We declare it, we tell it to
ourselves frantically.

"They're on fire! They're on fire!" cries the trembling voice of the
man beside me, whose shoulders are shaken by the shots he is hurling.

They draw near. They are lighted from below along the descent by the
flashing footlights of our fire; they grow bigger, and already we can
make out the forms of soldiers. They are at the same time in order and
in disorder. Their outlines are rigid, and one divines faces of stone.
Their rifles are slung and they have nothing in their hands. They come
on like sleep-walkers, only knowing how to put one foot before the
other, and surely they are singing. Yonder, in the bulk of the
invasion, the guns continue to destroy whole walls and whole structures
of life at will. On the edges of it we can clearly see isolated
silhouettes and groups as they fall, with an extended line of figures
like torchlights.

Now they are there, fifty paces away, breathing their ether into our
faces. We do not know what to do. We have no more cartridges. We fix
bayonets, our ears filled with that endless, undefined murmur which
comes from their mouths and the hollow rolling of the flood that
marches.

A shout spreads behind us:

"Orders to fall back!"

We bow down and evacuate the trench by openings at the back. There are
not a lot of us, we who thought we were so many. The trench is soon
empty, and we climb the hill that we descended in coming. We go up
towards our 75's, which are in lines behind the ridge and still
thundering. We climb at a venture, in the open, by vague paths and
tracks of mud; there are no trenches. During