We arrive at last on the summit, which is marked as with a signal by a wounded and frightful man.  He is upright in the wind, shaken but upright, enrooted there.  In his uplifted and wind-tossed cape we see a yelling and convulsive face.  We pass by him, and he is like a sort of screaming tree.

* * * * * *

We have arrived at our old first line, the one from which we set off for the attack.  We sit down on a firing-step with our backs to the holes cut for our exodus at the last minute by the sappers.  Euterpe, the cyclist, passes and gives us good-day.  Then he turns in his tracks and draws from the cuff of his coat-sleeve an envelope, whose protruding edge had conferred a white stripe on him.

“It’s you, isn’t it,” he says to me, “that takes Biquet’s letters that’s dead?”—­“Yes.”—­” Here’s a returned one; the address has hopped it.”

The envelope was exposed, no doubt, to rain on the top of a packet, and the address is no longer legible among the violet mottlings on the dried and frayed paper.  Alone there survives in a corner the address of the sender.  I pull the letter out gently—­“My dear mother”—­Ah, I remember!  Biquet, now lying in the open air in the very trench where we are halted, wrote that letter not long ago in our quarters at Gauchin-l’Abbe, one flaming and splendid afternoon, in reply to a letter from his mother, whose fears for him had proved groundless and made him laugh—­“You think I’m in the cold and rain and danger.  Not at all; on the contrary, all that’s finished.  It’s hot, we’re sweating, and we’ve nothing to do only to stroll about in the sunshine.  I laughed to read your letter—­”

I return to the frail and damaged envelope the letter which, if chance had not averted this new irony, would have been read by the old peasant woman at the moment when the body of her son is a wet nothing in the cold and the storm, a nothing that trickles and flows like a dark spring on the wall of the trench.

Joseph has leaned his head backwards.  His eyes close for a moment, his mouth half opens, and his breathing is fitful.

“Courage!” I say to him, and he opens his eyes again.

“Ah!” he replies, “it isn’t to me you should say that.  Look at those chaps, there, they’re going back yonder, and you too, you’re going back.  It all has to go on for you others.  Ah, one must be really strong to go on, to go on!”

21

The Refuge

From this point onwards we are in sight of the enemy observation-posts, and must no longer leave the communication trenches.  First we follow that of the Pylones road.  The trench is cut along the side of the road, and the road itself is wiped out; so are its trees.  Half of it, all the way along, has been chewed and swallowed by the trench; and what is left of it has been invaded by the earth and the grass, and mingled with the fields in the fullness of time.  At some places in the trench—­there, where a sandbag has burst and left only a muddy cell—­you may see again on the level of your eyes the stony ballast of the ex-road, cut to the quick, or even the roots of the bordering trees that have been cut down to embody in the trench wall.  The latter is as slashed and uneven as if it were a wave of earth and rubbish and dark scum that the immense plain has spat out and pushed against the edge of the trench.