And here the trench seems all lightning-struck.  With its tumbled white walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a vanished river that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the flat round hole of a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the sloping banks and in the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of corpses—­a dead river that is filled again to overflowing by the new tide and the breaking wave of our company.  In the smoke vomited by dug-outs and the shaking wind of subterranean explosions, I come upon a compact mass of men hooked onto each other who are describing a wide circle.  Just as we reach them the entire mass breaks up to make a residue of furious battle.  I see Blaire break away, his helmet hanging on his neck by the chin-strap and his face flayed, and uttering a savage yell.  I stumble upon a man who is crouching at the entry to a dug-out.  Drawing back from the black hatchway, yawning and treacherous, he steadies himself with his left hand on a beam.  In his right hand and for several seconds he holds a bomb which is on the point of exploding.  It disappears in the hole, bursts immediately, and a horrible human echo answers him from the bowels of the earth.  The man seizes another bomb.

Another man strikes and shatters the posts at the mouth of another dug-out with a pickax he has found there, causing a landslide, and the entry is blocked.  I see several shadows trampling and gesticulating over the tomb.

Of the living ragged band that has got so far and has reached this long-sought trench after dashing against the storm of invincible shells and bullets launched to meet them, I can hardly recognize those whom I know, just as though all that had gone before of our lives had suddenly become very distant.  There is some change working in them.  A frenzied excitement is driving them all out of themselves.

“What are we stopping here for?” says one, grinding his teeth.

“Why don’t we go on to the next?” a second asks me in fury.  “Now we’re here, we’d be there in a few jumps!’

“I, too, I want to go on.”—­“Me, too.  Ah, the hogs!” They shake themselves like banners.  They carry the luck of their survival as it were glory; they are implacable, uncontrolled, intoxicated with themselves.

We wait and stamp about in the captured work, this strange demolished way that winds along the plain and goes from the unknown to the unknown.

Advance to the right!

We begin to flow again in one direction.  No doubt it is a movement planned up there, back yonder, by the chiefs.  We trample soft bodies underfoot, some of which are moving and slowly altering their position; rivulets and cries come from them.  Like posts and heaps of rubbish, corpses are piled anyhow on the wounded, and press them down, suffocate them, strangle them.  So that I can get by, I must push at a slaughtered trunk of which the neck is a spring of gurgling blood.