So there we are, this man and I, jostling without knowing each other, revealed and then hidden from each other in sudden jerks by the flashes of the guns. oppressed by the opacity, the center of a huge circle of fires that appear and disappear in the devilish landscape.

“We’re under a curse,” says the man.

We separate, and go each to his own loophole, to weary our eyes upon invisibility.  Is some frightful and dismal storm about to break?  But that night it did not.  At the end of my long wait, with the first streaks of day, there was even a lull.

Again I saw, when the dawn came down on us like a stormy evening, the steep banks of our crumbling trench as they came to life again under the sooty scarf of the low-hanging clouds, a trench dismal and dirty, infinitely dirty, humped with debris and filthiness.  Under the livid sky the sandbags are taking the same hue, and their vaguely shining and rounded shapes are like the bowels and viscera of giants, nakedly exposed upon the earth.

In the trench-wall behind me, in a hollowed recess, there is a heap of horizontal things like logs.  Tree-trunks?  No, they are corpses.

* * * * * *

As the call of birds goes up from the furrowed ground, as the shadowy fields are renewed, and the light breaks and adorns each blade of grass, I look towards the ravine.  Below the quickening field and its high surges of earth and burned hollows, beyond the bristling of stakes, there is still a lifeless lake of shadow, and in front of the opposite slope a wall of night still stands.

Then I turn again and look upon these dead men whom the day is gradually exhuming, revealing their stained and stiffened forms.  There are four of them.  They are our comrades, Lamuse, Barque, Biquet, and little Eudore.  They rot there quite near us, blocking one half of the wide, twisting, and muddy furrow that the living must still defend.

They have been laid there as well as may be, supporting and crushing each other.  The topmost is wrapped in a tent-cloth.  Handkerchiefs had been placed on the faces of the others; but in brushing against them in the dark without seeing them, or even in the daytime without noticing them, the handkerchiefs have fallen, and we are living face to face with these dead, heaped up there like a wood-pile.

* * * * * *

It was four nights ago that they were all killed together.  I remember the night myself indistinctly—­it is like a dream.  We were on patrol—­they, I, Mesnil Andre, and Corporal Bertrand; and our business was to identify a new German listening-post marked by the artillery observers.  We left the trench towards midnight and crept down the slope in line, three or four paces from each other.  Thus we descended far into the ravine, and saw, lying before our eyes, the embankment of their International Trench.  After we had verified that there was no listening-post in this slice of the ground we climbed back, with