There is a swift illumination up above—­a rocket.  The scene in which I am stranded is picked out in sketchy incipience around me.  The crest of our trench stands forth, jagged and dishevelled, and I see, stuck to the outer wall every five paces like upright caterpillars, the shadows of the watchers.  Their rifles are revealed beside them by a few spots of light.  The trench is shored with sandbags.  It is widened everywhere, and in many places ripped up by landslides.  The sandbags, piled up and dislodged, appear in the starlike light of the rocket like the great dismantled stones of ancient ruined buildings.  I look through the loophole, and discern in the misty and pallid atmosphere expanded by the meteor the rows of stakes and even the thin lines of barbed wire which cross and recross between the posts.  To my seeing they are like strokes of a pen scratched upon the pale and perforated ground.  Lower down, the ravine is filled with the motionless silence of the ocean of night.

I come down from my look-out and steer at a guess towards my neighbor in vigil, and come upon him with outstretched hand.  “Is that you?” I say to him in a subdued voice, though I don’t know him.

“Yes,” he replies, equally ignorant who I am, blind like myself.  “It’s quiet at this time,” he adds “A bit since I thought they were going to attack, and they may have tried it on, on the right, where they chucked over a lot of bombs.  There’s been a barrage of 75’s—­vrrrran, vrrrran—­Old man, I said to myself, ’Those 75’s, p’raps they’ve good reason for firing.  If they did come out, the Boches, they must have found something.’  Tiens, listen, down there, the bullets buffing themselves!”

He opens his flask and takes a draught, and his last words, still subdued, smell of wine:  “Ah, la, la!  Talk about a filthy war!  Don’t you think we should be a lot better at home!—­Hullo!  What’s the matter with the ass?” A rifle has rung out beside us, making a brief and sudden flash of phosphorescence.  Others go off here and there along our line.  Rifle-shots are catching after dark.

We go to inquire of one of the shooters, guessing our way through the solid blackness that has fallen again upon us like a roof.  Stumbling, and thrown anon on each other, we reach the man and touch him—­“Well, what’s up?”

He thought he saw something moving, but there is nothing more.  We return through the density, my unknown neighbor and I, unsteady, and laboring along the narrow way of slippery mud, doubled up as if we each carried a crushing burden.  At one point of the horizon and then at another all around, a gun sounds, and its heavy din blends with the volleys of rifle-fire, redoubled one minute and dying out the next, and with the clusters of grenade-reports, of deeper sound than the crack of Lebel or Mauser, and nearly like the voice of the old classical rifles.  The wind has again increased; it is so strong that one must protect himself against it in the darkness; masses of huge cloud are passing in front of the moon.