In the cataclysm of earth and of massive wreckage blown up and blown out, above the hordes of wounded and dead that stir together, athwart the moving forest of smoke implanted in the trench and in all its environs, one no longer sees any face but what is inflamed, blood-red with sweat, eyes flashing.  Some groups seem to be dancing as they brandish their knives.  They are elated, immensely confident, ferocious.

The battle dies down imperceptibly.  A soldier says, “Well, what’s to be done now?” ft flares up again suddenly at one point.  Twenty yards away in the plain, in the direction of a circle that the gray embankment makes, a cluster of rifle-shots crackles and hurls its scattered missiles around a hidden machine-gun, that spits intermittently and seems to be in difficulties.

Under the shadowy wing of a sort of yellow and bluish nimbus I see men encircling the flashing machine and closing in on it.  Near to me I make out the silhouette of Mesnil Joseph, who is steering straight and with no effort of concealment for the spot whence the barking explosions come in jerky sequence.

A flash shoots out from a corner of the trench between us two.  Joseph halts, sways, stoops, and drops on one knee.  I run to him and he watches me coming.  “It’s nothing—­my thigh.  I can crawl along by myself.”  He seems to have become quiet, childish, docile; and sways slowly towards the trench.

I have still in my eyes the exact spot whence rang the shot that hit him, and I slip round there by the left, making a detour.  No one there.  I only meet another of our squad on the same errand—­Paradis.

We are bustled by men who are carrying on their shoulders pieces of iron of all shapes.  They block up the trench and separate us.  “The machine-gun’s taken by the 7th,” they shout, “it won’t bark any more.  It was a mad devil—­filthy beast!  Filthy beast!”

“What’s there to do now?”—­“Nothing.”

We stay there, jumbled together, and sit down.  The living have ceased to gasp for breath, the dying have rattled their last, surrounded by smoke and lights and the din of the guns that rolls to all the ends of the earth.  We no longer know where we are.  There is neither earth nor sky—­nothing but a sort of cloud.  The first period of inaction is forming in the chaotic drama, and there is a general slackening in the movement and the uproar.  The cannonade grows less; it still shakes the sky as a cough shakes a man, but it is farther off now.  Enthusiasm is allayed, and there remains only the infinite fatigue that rises and overwhelms us, and the infinite waiting that begins over again.

* * * * * *

Where is the enemy?  He has left his dead everywhere, and we have seen rows of prisoners.  Yonder again there is. one, drab, ill-defined and smoky, outlined against the dirty sky.  But the bulk seem to have dispersed afar.  A few shells come to us here and there blunderingly, and we ridicule them.  We are saved, we are quiet, we are alone, in this desert where an immensity of corpses adjoins a line of the living.