Suddenly a vivid star expands down yonder in the uncertain direction that we are taking—­a rocket.  Widely it lights a part of the sky with its milky nimbus, blots out the stars, and then falls gracefully, fairy-like.

There is a swift light opposite us over there; a flash and a detonation.  It is a shell!  By the flat reflection that the explosion instantaneously spreads over the lower sky we see a ridge clearly outlined in front of us from east to west, perhaps half a mile away.

That ridge is ours—­so much of it as we can see from here and up to the top of it, where our troops are.  On the other slope, a hundred yards from our first line, is the first German line.  The shell fell on the summit, in our lines; it is the others who are firing.  Another shell another and yet another plant trees of faintly violet light on the top of the rise, and each of them dully illumines the whole of the horizon.

Soon there is a sparkling of brilliant stars and a sudden jungle of fiery plumes on the hill; and a fairy mirage of blue and white hangs lightly before our eyes in the full gulf of night.

Those among us who must devote the whole buttressed power of their arms and legs to prevent their greasy loads from sliding off their backs and to prevent themselves from sliding to the ground, these neither see nor hear anything.  The others, sniffing and shivering with cold, wiping their noses with limp and sodden handkerchiefs, watch and remark, cursing the obstacles in the way with fragments of profanity.  “It’s like watching fireworks,” they say.

And to complete the illusion of a great operatic scene, fairy-like but sinister, before which our bent and black party crawls and splashes, behold a red star, and then a green; then a sheaf of red fire, very much tardier.  In our ranks, as the available half of our pairs of eyes watch the display, we cannot help murmuring in idle tones of popular admiration, “Ah, a red one!”—­“Look, a green one!” It is the Germans who are sending up signals, and our men as well who are asking for artillery support.

Our road turns and climbs again as the day at last decides to appear.  Everything looks dirty.  A layer of stickiness, pearl-gray and white, covers the road, and around it the real world makes a mournful appearance.  Behind us we leave ruined Souchez, whose houses are only flat heaps of rubbish and her trees but humps of bramble-like slivers.  We plunge into a hole on our left, the entrance to the communication trench.  We let our loads fall in a circular enclosure prepared for them, and both hot and frozen we settled in the trench and wait our hands abraded, wet, and stiff with cramp.