Behind us voices urge us—­Forward, boys, forward, nome de Dieu!”

“All the regiment is behind us!” they cry.  We do not turn round to see, but the assurance electrifies our rush once more.

No more caps are visible behind the embankment of the trench we are nearing.  Some German dead are crumbling in front of it, in pinnacled heaps or extended lines.  We are there.  The parapet takes definite and sinister shape and detail; the loopholes—­we are prodigiously, incredibly close!

Something falls in front of us.  It is a bomb.  With a kick Corporal Bertrand returns it so well that it rises and bursts just over the trench.

With that fortunate deed the squad reaches the trench.

Pepin has hurled himself flat on the ground and is involved with a corpse.  He reaches the edge and plunges in—­the first to enter.  Fouillade, with great gestures and shouts, jumps into the pit almost at the same moment that Pepin rolls down it.  Indistinctly I see—­in the time of the lightning’s flash—­a whole row of black demons stooping and squatting for the descent, on the ridge of the embankment, on the edge of the dark ambush.

A terrible volley bursts point-blank in our faces, flinging in front of us a sudden row of flames the whole length of the earthen verge.  After the stunning shock we shake ourselves and burst into devilish laughter—­the discharge has passed too high.  And at once, with shouts and roars of salvation, we slide and roll and fall alive into the belly of the trench!

* * * * * *

We are submerged in a mysterious smoke, and at first I can only see blue uniforms in the stifling gulf.  We go one way and then another, driven by each other, snarling and searching.  We turn about, and with our hands encumbered by knife, bombs, and rifle, we do not know at first what to do.

“They’re in their funk-holes, the swine!” is the cry.  Heavy explosions are shaking the earth—­underground, in the dug-outs.  We are all at once divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are masked and can see nothing more.  We struggle like drowning men through the acrid darkness of a fallen fragment of night.  One stumbles against barriers of cowering clustered beings who bleed and howl in the bottom.  Hardly can one make out the trench walls, straight up just here and made of white sandbags, which are everywhere torn like paper.  At one time the heavy adhesive reek sways and lifts, and one sees again the swarming mob of the attackers.  Torn out of the dusty picture, the silhouette of a hand-to-hand struggle is drawn in fog on the wall, it droops and sinks to the bottom.  I hear several shrill cries of “Kamarad!” proceeding from a pale-faced and gray-clad group in the huge corner made by a rending shell.  Under the inky cloud the tempest of men flows back, climbs towards the right, eddying, pitching and falling, along the dark and ruined mole.

* * * * * *

And suddenly one feels that it is over.  We see and hear and understand that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has not encountered an equal breaker.  They have fallen back on our approach.  The battle has dissolved in front of us.  The slender curtain of defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are caught like rats or killed.  There is no more resistance, but a void, a great void.  We advance in crowds like a terrible array of spectators.