We descend over the rough and slippery ground with involuntary gestures, helping ourselves sometimes with the rifle.  Mechanically the eye fastens on some detail of the declivity, of the ruined ground, on the sparse and shattered stakes pricking up, at the wreckage in the holes.  It is unbelievable that we are upright in full daylight on this slope where several survivors remember sliding along in the darkness with such care, and where the others have only hazarded furtive glances through the loopholes.  No, there is no firing against us.  The wide exodus of the battalion out of the ground seems to have passed unnoticed!  This truce is full of an increasing menace, increasing.  The pale light confuses us.

On all sides the slope is covered by men who, like us, are bent on the descent.  On the right the outline is defined of a company that is reaching the ravine by Trench 97—­an old German work in ruins.  We cross our wire by openings.  Still no one fires on us.  Some awkward ones who have made false steps are getting up again.  We form up on the farther side of the entanglements and then set ourselves to topple down the slope rather faster—­there is an instinctive acceleration in the movement.  Several bullets arrive at last among us.  Bertrand shouts to us to reserve our bombs and wait till the last moment.

But the sound of his voice is carried away.  Abruptly, across all the width of the opposite slope, lurid flames burst forth that strike the air with terrible detonations.  In line from left to right fires emerge from the sky and explosions from the ground.  It is a frightful curtain which divides us from the world, which divides us from the past and from the future.  We stop, fixed to the ground, stupefied by the sudden host that thunders from every side; then a simultaneous effort uplifts our mass again and throws it swiftly forward.  We stumble and impede each other in the great waves of smoke.  With harsh crashes and whirlwinds of pulverized earth, towards the profundity into which we hurl ourselves pell-mell, we see craters opened here and there, side by side, and merging in each other.  Then one knows no longer where the discharges fall.  Volleys are let loose so monstrously resounding that one feels himself annihilated by the mere sound of the downpoured thunder of these great constellations of destruction that form in the sky.  One sees and one feels the fragments passing close to one’s head with their hiss of red-hot iron plunged in water.  The blast of one explosion so burns my hands that I let my rifle fall.  I pick it up again, reeling, and set off in the tawny-gleaming tempest with lowered head, lashed by spirits of dust and soot in a crushing downpour like volcanic lava.  The stridor of the bursting shells hurts your ears, beats you on the neck, goes through your temples, and you cannot endure it without a cry.  The gusts of death drive us on, lift us up, rock us to and fro.  We leap, and do not know whither we go.  Our eyes are blinking and weeping and obscured.  The view before us is blocked by a flashing avalanche that fills space.