A short and uncertain calm follows.  We are less deafened and look at each other.  There is fever in the eyes, and the cheek-bones are blood-red.  Our breathing snores and our hearts drum in our bodies.

In haste and confusion we recognize each other, as if we had met again face to face in a nightmare on the uttermost shores of death.  Some hurried words are cast upon this glade in hell—­“It’s you! “—­“Where’s Cocon?”—­“Don’t know.”—­“Have you seen the captain? “—­“No.”—­“Going strong?”—­“Yes.”

The bottom of the ravine is crossed and the other slope rises opposite.  We climb in Indian file by a stairway rough-hewn in the ground:  “Look out!” The shout means that a soldier half-way up the steps has been struck in the loins by a shell-fragment; he falls with his arms forward, bareheaded, like the diving swimmer.  We can see the shapeless silhouette of the mass as it plunges into the gulf.  I can almost see the detail of his blown hair over the black profile of his face.

We debouch upon the height.  A great colorless emptiness is outspread before us.  At first one can see nothing but a chalky and stony plain, yellow and gray to the limit of sight.  No human wave is preceding ours; in front of us there is no living soul, but the ground is peopled with dead—­recent corpses that still mimic agony or sleep, and old remains already bleached and scattered to the wind, half assimilated by the earth.

As soon as our pushing and jolted file emerges, two men close to me are hit, two shadows are hurled to the ground and roll under our feet, one with a sharp cry, and the other silently, as a felled ox.  Another disappears with the caper of a lunatic, as if he had been snatched away.  Instinctively we close up as we hustle forward—­always forward—­and the wound in our line closes of its own accord.  The adjutant stops, raises his sword, lets it fall, and drops to his knees.  His kneeling body slopes backward in jerks, his helmet drops on his heels, and he remains there, bareheaded, face to the sky.  Hurriedly the rush of the rank has split open to respect his immobility.

But we cannot see the lieutenant.  No more leaders then—­Hesitation checks the wave of humanity that begins to beat on the plateau.  Above the trampling one hears the hoarse effort of our lungs.  “Forward!” cries some soldier, and then all resume the onward race to perdition with increasing speed.

* * * * * *

“Where’s Bertrand?” comes the laborious complaint of one of the foremost runners.  “There!  Here!” He had stooped in passing over a wounded man, but he leaves him quickly, and the man extends his arms towards him and seems to sob.

It is just at the moment when he rejoins us that we hear in front of us, coming from a sort of ground swelling, the crackle of a machine-gun.  It is a moment of agony—­more serious even than when we were passing through the flaming earthquake of the barrage.  That familiar voice speaks to us across the plain, sharp and horrible.  But we no longer stop.  “Go on, go on!”