infinite care.  Dimly I saw my neighbors to right and left, like sacks of shadow, crawling, slowly sliding, undulating and rocking in the mud and the murk, with the projecting needle in front of a rifle.  Some bullets whistled above us, but they did not know we were there, they were not looking for us.  When we got within sight of the mound of our line, we took a breather for a moment; one of us let a sigh go, another spoke.  Another turned round bodily, and the sheath of his bayonet rang out against a stone.  Instantly a rocket shot redly up from the International Trench.  We threw ourselves flat on the ground, closely, desperately, and waited there motionless, with the terrible star hanging over us and flooding us with daylight, twenty-five or thirty yards from our trench.  Then a machine-gun on the other side of the ravine swept the zone where we were.  Corporal Bertrand and I had had the luck to find in front of us, just as the red rocket went up and before it burst into light, a shell-hole, where a broken trestle was steeped in the mud.  We flattened ourselves against the edge of the hole, buried ourselves in the mud as much as possible, and the poor skeleton of rotten wood concealed us.  The jet of the machine-gun crossed several times.  We heard a piercing whistle in the middle of each report, the sharp and violent sound of bullets that went into the earth, and dull and soft blows as well, followed by groans, by a little cry, and suddenly by a sound like the heavy snoring of a sleeper, a sound which slowly ebbed.  Bertrand and I waited, grazed by the horizontal hail of bullets that traced a network of death an inch or so above us and sometimes scraped our clothes, driving us still deeper into the mud, nor dared we risk a movement which might have lifted a little some part of our bodies.  The machine-gun at last held its peace in an enormous silence.  A quarter of an hour later we two slid out of the shell-hole, and crawling on our elbows we fell at last like bundles into our listening-post.  It was high time, too, for at that moment the moon shone out.  We were obliged to stay in the bottom of the trench till morning, and then till evening, for the machine-gun swept the approaches without pause.  We could not see the prostrate bodies through the loop-holes of the post, by reason of the steepness of the ground—­except, just on the level of our field of vision, a lump which appeared to be the back of one of them.  In the evening, a sap was dug to reach the place where they had fallen.  The work could not be finished in one night and was resumed by the pioneers the following night, for, overwhelmed with fatigue, we could no longer keep from falling asleep.