“It was here,” says a passing soldier of an Alpine regiment, “that they did the white flag trick; and as they’d got Africans to deal with, you bet they got it hot!—­Tiens, there’s the white flag itself that these dunghills used.”

He seizes and shakes a long handle that lies there.  A square of white stuff is nailed to it, and unfolds itself innocently.

A procession of shovel-bearers advances along the battered trench.  They have an order to shovel the earth into the relics of the trenches, to stop everything up, so that the bodies may be buried on the spot.  Thus these helmeted warriors will here perform the work of the redresser of wrongs as they restore their full shape to the fields and make level the cavities already half filled by cargoes of invaders.

* * * * * *

Some one calls me from the other side of the trench, a man sitting on the ground and leaning against a stake.  It is Papa Ramure.  Through his unbuttoned greatcoat and jacket I see bandages around his chest.  “The ambulance men have been to tuck me up,” he says, in a weak and stertorous voice, “but they can’t take me away from here before evening.  But I know all right that I’m petering out every minute.”

He jerks his head.  “Stay a bit,” he asks me.  He is much moved, and the tears are flowing.  He offers his hand and holds mine.  He wants to say a lot of things to me and almost to make confession.  “I was a straight man before the war,” he says, with trickling tears; “I worked from morning to night to feed my little lot.  And then I came here to kill Boches.  And now, I’ve got killed.  Listen, listen, listen, don’t go away, listen to me—­”

“I must take Joseph back—­he’s at the end of his strength.  I’ll come back afterwards.”

Ramure lifted his streaming eyes to the wounded man.  “Not only living, but wounded!  Escaped from death!  Ah, some women and children are lucky!  All right, take him, take him, and come back—­I hope I shall be waiting for you—­”

Now we must climb the other slope of the ravine, and we enter the deformed and maltreated ditch of the old Trench 97.

Suddenly a frantic whistling tears the air and there is a shower of shrapnel above us.  Meteorites flash and scatter in fearful flight in the heart of the yellow clouds.  Revolving missiles rush through the heavens to break and burn upon the bill, to ransack it and exhume the old bones of men; and the thundering flames multiply themselves along an even line.

It is the barrage fire beginning again.  Like children we cry, “Enough, enough!”

In this fury of fatal engines, this mechanical cataclysm that pursues us through space, there is something that surpasses human strength and will, something supernatural.  Joseph, standing with his hand in mine, looks over his shoulder at the storm of rending explosions.  He bows his head like an imprisoned beast, distracted:  “What, again!  Always, then!” he growls; “after all we’ve done and all we’ve seen—­and now it begins again!  Ah, non, non!”