When we see them we say, “They are dead, all four”; but they are too far disfigured for us to say truly, “It is they,” and one must turn away from the motionless monsters to feel the void they have left among us and the familiar things that have been wrenched away.

Men of other companies or regiments, strangers who come this way by day—­by night one leans unconsciously on everything within reach of the hand, dead or alive-give a start when faced by these corpses flattened one on the other in the open trench.  Sometimes they are angry—­“What are they thinking about to leave those stiffs there?”—­“It’s shameful.”  Then they add, “It’s true they can’t be taken away from there.”  And they were only buried in the night.

Morning has come.  Opposite us we see the other slope of the ravine, Hill 119, an eminence scraped, stripped, and scratched, veined with shaken trenches and lined with parallel cuttings that vividly reveal the clay and the chalky soil.  Nothing is stirring there; and our shells that burst in places with wide spouts of foam like huge billows seem to deliver their resounding blows upon a great breakwater, ruined and abandoned.

My spell of vigil is finished, and the other sentinels, enveloped in damp and trickling tent-cloths, with their stripes and plasters of mud and their livid jaws, disengage themselves from the soil wherein they are molded, bestir themselves, and come down.  For us, it is rest until evening.

We yawn and stroll.  We see a comrade pass and then another.  Officers go to and fro, armed with periscopes and telescopes.  We feel our feet again, and begin once more to live.  The customary remarks cross and clash; and were it not for the dilapidated outlook, the sunken lines of the trench that buries us on the hillside, and the veto on our voices, we might fancy ourselves in the rear lines.  But lassitude weighs upon all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the eyelids reddened; through long watching we look as if we had been weeping.  For several days now we have all of us been sagging and growing old.

One after another the men of my squad have made a confluence at a curve in the trench.  They pile themselves where the soil is only chalky, and where, above the crust that bristles with severed roots, the excavations have exposed some beds of white stones that had lain in the darkness for over a hundred thousand years.

There in the widened fairway, Bertrand’s squad beaches itself.  It is much reduced this time, for beyond the losses of the other night, we no longer have Poterloo, killed in a relief, nor Cadilhac. wounded in the leg by a splinter the same evening as Poterloo, nor Tirioir nor Tulacque who have been sent back, the one for dysentery, and the other for pneumonia, which is taking an ugly turn—­as he says in the postcards which he sends us as a pastime from the base hospital where he is vegetating.

Once more I see gathered and grouped, soiled by contact with the earth and dirty smoke, the familiar faces and poses of those who have not been separated since the beginning, chained and riveted together in fraternity.  But there is less dissimilarity than at the beginning in the appearance of the cave-men.