Night has come.  The dust has flown away, but has yielded place to shadow and darkness over the long-drawn multitude’s disorder.  Men approach each other, sit down, get up again and walk about, leaning on each other or hooked together.  Between the dug-outs, which are blocked by the mingled dead, we gather in groups and squat.  Some have laid their rifles on the ground and wander on the rim of the trench with their arms balancing; and when they come near we can see that they are blackened and scorched, their eyes are red and slashed with mud.  We speak seldom, but are beginning to think.

We see the stretcher-bearers, whose sharp silhouettes stoop and grope; they advance linked two and two together by their long burdens.  Yonder on our right one hears the blows of pick and shovel.

I wander into the middle of this gloomy turmoil.  In a place where the embankment has crushed the embankment of the trench into a gentle slope, some one is seated.  A faint light still prevails.  The tranquil attitude of this man as he looks reflectively in front of him is sculptural and striking.  Stooping, I recognize him as Corporal Bertrand.  He turns his face towards me, and I feel that he is looking at me through the shadows with his thoughtful smile.

“I was coming to look for you,” he says; “they’re organizing a guard for the trench until we’ve got news of what the others have done and what’s going on in front.  I’m going to put you on double sentry with Paradis, in a listening-post that the sappers have just dug.”

We watch the shadows of the passers-by and of those who are seated, outlined in inky blots, bowed and bent in diverse attitudes under the gray sky, all along the ruined parapet.  Dwarfed to the size of insects and worms, they make a strange and secret stirring among these shadow-hidden lands where for two years war has caused cities of soldiers to wander or stagnate over deep and boundless cemeteries.

Two obscure forms pass in the dark, several paces from us; they are talking together in low voices—­“You bet, old chap, instead of listening to him, I shoved my bayonet into his belly so that I couldn’t haul it out.”

“There were four in the bottom of the hole.  I called to ’em to come out, and as soon as one came out I stuck him.  Blood ran down me up to the elbow and stuck up my sleeves.”

“Ah!” the first speaker went on, “when we are telling all about it later, if we get back, to the other people at home, by the stove and the candle, who’s going to believe it?  It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

“I don’t care a damn about that, as long as we do get back,” said the other; “I want the end quickly, and only that.”

Bertrand was used to speak very little ordinarily, and never of himself.  But he said, “I’ve got three of them on my hands.  I struck like a madman.  Ah, we were all like beasts when we got here!”

He raised his voice and there was a restrained tremor in it:  “it was necessary,” he said, “it was necessary, for the future’s sake.”