“We’re behind time—­the soup-water’ll be freezing.  Hurry up, so far.  Afterwards there’ll be a good yarn to tell in the sewer where the boys are, about what we did to the Boches.”

19

Bombardment

We are in the flat country, a vast mistiness, but above it is dark blue.  The end of the night is marked by a little falling snow which powders our shoulders and the folds in our sleeves.  We are marching in fours, hooded.  We seem in the turbid twilight to be the wandering survivors of one Northern district who are trekking to another.

We have followed a road and have crossed the ruins of Ablain-Saint-Nazaire.  We have had confused glimpses of its whitish heaps of houses and the dim spider-webs of its suspended roofs.  The village is so long that although full night buried us in it we saw its last buildings beginning to pale in the frost of dawn.  Through the grating of a cellar on the edge of this petrified ocean’s waves, we made out the fire kept going by the custodians of the dead town.  We have paddled in swampy fields, lost ourselves in silent places where the mud seized us by the feet, we have dubiously regained our balance and our bearings again on another road, the one which leads from Carency to Souchez.  The tall bordering poplars are shivered and their trunks mangled; in one place the road is an enormous colonnade of trees destroyed.  Then, marching with us on both sides, we see through the shadows ghostly dwarfs of trees, wide-cloven like spreading palms; botched and jumbled into round blocks or long strips; doubled upon themselves, as if they knelt.  From time to time our march is disordered and bustled by the yielding of a swamp.  The road becomes a marsh which we cross on our heels, while our feet make the sound of sculling.  Planks have been laid in it here and there.  Where they have so far sunk in the mud as to proffer their edges to us we slip on them.  Sometimes there is enough water to float them, and then under the weight of a man they splash and go under, and the man stumbles or falls, with frenzied imprecations.

It must be five o’clock.  The stark and affrighting scene unfolds itself to our eyes, but it is still encircled by a great fantastic ring of mist and of darkness.  We go on and on without pause, and come to a place where we can make out a dark hillock, at the foot of which there seems to be some lively movement of human beings.

“Advance by twos,” says the leader of the detachment.  “Let each team of two take alternately a plank and a hurdle.”  We load ourselves up.  One of the two in each couple assumes the rifle of his partner as well as his own.  The other with difficulty shifts and pulls out from the pile a long plank, muddy and slippery, which weighs full eighty pounds, or a hurdle of leafy branches as big as a door, which he can only just keep on his back as he bends forward with his hands aloft and grips its edges.

We resume our march, very slowly and very ponderously, scattered over the now graying road, with complaints and heavy curses which the effort strangles in our throats.  After about a hundred yards, the two men of each team exchange loads, so that after two hundred yards, in spite of the bitter blenching breeze of early morning, all but the non-coms. are running with sweat.