morsel of mortality.  My thoughts, and I cannot help them, are attracted by the horizontal body that the world bruises; they go into the ground with it and mold a shape for it.  Its face—­what is the look which rots crushed in the dark depth of the earth at the top of these remains?  Ah, one catches sight of what there is under the battlefields!  Everywhere in the spacious wall there are limbs, and black and muddy gestures.  It is a sepulchral sculptor’s great sketch-model, a bas-relief in clay that stands haughtily before our eyes.  It is the portal of the earth’s interior; yes, it is the gate of hell.

* * * * * *

In order to get here, I slept as I marched; and now I have an illusion that I am hidden in this little cave, cooped up against the curve of the roof.  I am no more than this gentle cry of the flesh—­Sleep!  As I begin to doze and people myself with dreams, a man comes in.  He is unarmed, and he ransacks us with the stabbing white point of his flash-lamp.  It is the colonel’s batman.  He says to our adjutant as soon as he finds him:—­

“Six fatigue men wanted.”

The adjutant’s bulk rises and yawns:—­

“Butsire, Vindame, Margat, Termite, Paulin, Remus!” he orders as he goes to sleep again.

We emerge from the cave; and more slowly, from our drowsiness.  We find ourselves standing in a village street.  But as soon as we touch the open air, dazzling roars precede and follow us, mere handful of men as we are, abruptly revealing us to each other.  We hurl ourselves like a pack of hounds into the first door or the first gaping hole, and there are some who cry that:  “We are marked.  We’re given away!”

After the porterage fatigue we go back.  I settle myself in my corner, heavier, more exhausted, more buried in the bottom of everything.  I was beginning to sleep, to go away from myself, lulled by a voice which sought in vain the number of the days we had been on the move, and was repeating the names of the nights—­Thursday, Friday, Saturday—­when the man with the pointed light returns, demands a gang, and I set off with the others.  It is so again for a third time.  As soon as we are outside, the night, which seems to lie in wait for us, sends us a squall, with its thunderous destruction of space; it scatters us; then we are drawn together and joined up.  We carry thick planks, two by two; and then piles of sacks which blind the bearers with a plastery dust and make them reel like masts.

Then the last time, the most terrible, it was wire.  Each of us takes into his hands a great hoop of coiled wire, as tall as ourselves, and weighing over sixty pounds.  When one carries it, the supple wheel stretches out like an animal; it is set dancing by the least movement, it works into the flesh of the shoulder, and strikes one’s feet.  Mine tries to cling to me and pull me up and throw me to the ground.  With this malignantly heavy thing, animated with barbarous and powerful movement, I cross the ruins of a railway station, all stones and beams.  We clamber up an embankment which slips away and avoids us, we drag and push the rebellious and implacable burden.  It cannot be reached, that receding height.  But we reach it, all the same.