ot to walk on the obstructions, and then I had to,
and I dared. My foot trembled on the hard or supple masses which
peopled that sap.

On the edge of the hole--there had been a road above it formerly, or
perhaps even a market-place--the trunk of a tree severed near the
ground arose, short as a grave-stone. The sight stopped me for a
moment, and my heart, weakened no doubt by my physical destitution,
kindled with pity for the tree become a tomb!

Two hours later I rejoined the section in its pit. We abide there,
while the cannonade increases. The morning goes by, then the
afternoon. Then it is evening.

They make us go into a wide dugout. It appears that an attack is
developing somewhere. From time to time, through a breach contrived
between sandbags so decomposed and oozing that they seem to have lived,
we go out to a little winterly and mournful crossing, to look about.
We consult the sky to determine the tempest's whereabouts. We can know
nothing.

The artillery fire dazzles and then chokes up our sight. The heavens
are making a tumult of blades.

Monuments of steel break loose and crash above our heads. Under the
sky, which is dark as with threat of deluge, the explosions throw livid
sunshine in all directions. From one end to the other of the visible
world the fields move and descend and dissolve, and the immense expanse
stumbles and falls like the sea. Towering explosions in the east, a
squall in the south; in the zenith a file of bursting shrapnel like
suspended volcanoes.

The smoke which goes by, and the hours as well, darken the inferno.
Two or three of us risk our faces at the earthen cleft and look out, as
much for the purpose of propping ourselves against the earth as for
seeing. But we see nothing, nothing on the infinite expanse which is
full of rain and dusk, nothing but the clouds which tear themselves and
blend together in the sky, and the clouds which come out of the earth.

Then, in the slanting rain and the limitless gray, we see a man, one
only, who advances with his bayonet forward, like a specter.

We watch this shapeless being, this thing, leaving our lines and going
away yonder.

We only see one--perhaps that is the shadow of another, on his left.

We do not understand, and then we do. It is the end of the attacking
wave.

What can his thoughts be--this man alone in the rain as if under a
curse, who goes upright away, forward, when space is changed into a
shrieking m