It is so cold that we cannot stand still in spite of our fettering fatigue.  We tremble and shiver and shed tears, and our teeth chatter.  Little by little, with dispiriting tardiness, day escapes from the sky into the slender framework of the black clouds.  All is frozen, colorless and empty; a deathly silence reigns everywhere.  There is rime and snow under a burden of mist.  Everything is white.  Paradis moves—­a heavy pallid ghost, for we two also are all white.  I had placed my shoulder-bag on the other side of the parapet, and it looks as if wrapped in paper.  In the bottom of the hole a little snow floats, fretted and gray in the black foot-bath.  Outside the hole, on the piled-up things, in the excavations, upon the crowded dead, snow rests like muslin.

Two stooping protuberant masses are crayoned on the mist; they grow darker as they approach and hail us.  They are the men who come to relieve us.  Their faces are ruddy and tearful with cold, their cheek-bones like enameled tiles; but their greatcoats are not snow-powdered, for they have slept underground.

Paradis hoists himself out.  Over the plain I follow his Father Christmas back and the duck-like waddle of the boots that pick up white-felted soles.  Bending deeply forward we regain the trench; the footsteps of those who replaced us are marked in black on the scanty whiteness that covers the ground.

Watchers are standing at intervals in the trench, over which tarpaulins are stretched on posts here and there, figured in white velvet or mottled with rime, and forming great irregular tents; and between the watchers are squatting forms who grumble and try to fight against the cold. to exclude it from the meager fireside of their own chests, or who are simply frozen.  A dead man has slid down. upright and hardly askew, with his feet in the trench and his chest and arms resting on the bank.  He was clasping the earth when life left him.  His face is turned skyward and is covered with a leprosy of ice, the eyelids are white as the eyes, the mustache caked with hard slime.  Other bodies are sleeping, less white than that one; the snowy stratum is only intact on lifeless things.

“We must sleep.”  Paradis and I are looking for shelter, a hole where we may hide ourselves and shut our eyes.  “It can’t be helped if there are stiffs in the dugouts,” mutters Paradis; “in a cold like this they’ll keep, they won’t be too bad.”  We go forward, so weary that we can only see the ground.

I am alone.  Where is Paradis?  He must have lain down in some hole, and perhaps I did not hear his call.  I meet Marthereau.  “I’m looking where I can sleep, I’ve been on guard,” he says.

“I, too; let’s look together.”

“What’s all the row and to-do?” says Marthereau.  A mingled hubbub of trampling and voices overflows from the communication trench that goes off here.  “The communication trenches are full of men.  Who are you?”