“Trench must be cleared—­Gee up!” We leave this most infamous corner of the battlefield where even the dead are torn, wounded, and slain anew.

We turn towards the right and towards the rear.  The communication trench rises, and at the top of the gully we pass in front of a telephone station and a group of artillery officers and gunners.  Here there is a further halt.  We mark time, and hear the artillery observer shout his commands, which the telephonist buried beside him picks up and repeats:  “First gun, same sight; two-tenths to left; three a minute!”

Some of us have risked our heads over the edge of the bank and have glimpsed for the space of the lightning’s flash all the field of battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the morning.  I saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind seemed to be driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places by a more pointed billow of smoke.

Where the sun and the clouds trail patches of black and of white, the immense space sparkles dully from point to point where our batteries are firing, and I saw it one moment entirely spangled with short-lived flashes.  Another minute, part of the field grew dark under a steamy and whitish film, a sort of hurricane of snow.

Afar, on the evil, endless, and half-ruined fields, caverned like cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of torn paper; and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim rows of vertical marks, close together and underlined, like the straight strokes of a written page—­these are the roads and their trees.  Delicate meandering lines streak the plain backward and forward and rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with men.

We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human points who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on the plain in the horrible face of the flying firmament.  It is difficult to believe that each of those tiny spots is a living thing with fragile and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, full of deep thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures.  One is fascinated by this scattered dust of men as small as the stars in the sky.

Poor unknowns, poor fellow-men, it is your turn to give battle.  Another time it will be ours.  Perhaps to-morrow it will be ours to feel the heavens burst over our heads or the earth open under our feet, to be assailed by the prodigious plague of projectiles, to be swept away by the blasts of a tornado a hundred thousand times stronger than the tornado.

They urge us into the rearward shelters.  For our eyes the field of death vanishes.  To our ears the thunder is deadened on the great anvil of the clouds.  The sound of universal destruction is still.  The squad surrounds itself with the familiar noises of life, and sinks into the fondling littleness of the dug-outs.

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[note 1] Military slang for machine-gun—­Tr.