We arrive at a junction of trenches, and on the top of the maltreated hillock which is outlined on the cloudy grayness, a mournful signboard stands crookedly in the wind.  The trench system becomes still more cramped and close, and the men who are flowing towards the clearing-station from all parts of the sector multiply and throng in the deep-dug ways.

These lamentable lanes are staked out with corpses.  At uneven intervals their walls are broken into by quite recent gaps, extending to their full depth, by funnelholes of fresh earth which trespass upon the unwholesome land beyond, where earthy bodies are squatting with their chins on their knees or leaning against the wall as straight and silent as the rifles which wait beside them.  Some of these standing dead turn their blood-bespattered faces towards the survivors; others exchange their looks with the sky’s emptiness.

Joseph halts to take breath.  I say to him as to a child, “We’re nearly there, we’re nearly there.”

The sinister ramparts of this way of desolation contract still more.  They impel a feeling of suffocation, of a nightmare of falling which oppresses and strangles:  and in these depths where the walls seem to be coming nearer and closing in, you are forced to halt, to wriggle a path for yourself, to vex and disturb the dead, to be pushed about by the endless disorder of the files that flow along these hinder trenches, files made up of messengers, of the maimed, of men who groan and who cry aloud, who hurry frantically, crimsoned by fever or pallid and visibly shaken by pain.

* * * * * *

All this throng at last pulls up and gathers and groans at the crossways where the burrows of the Refuge open out.

A doctor is trying with shouts and gesticulations to keep a little space clear from the rising tide that beats upon the threshold of the shelter, where he applies summary bandages in the open air; they say he has not ceased to do it, nor his helpers either, all the night and all the day, that he is accomplishing a superhuman task.

When they leave his hands, some of the wounded are swallowed up by the black hole of the Refuge; others are sent back to the bigger clearing-station contrived in the trench on the Bethune road.

In this confined cavity formed by the crossing of the ditches, in the bottom of a sort of robbers’ den, we waited two hours, buffeted, squeezed, choked and blinded, climbing over each other like cattle, in an odor of blood and butchery.  There are faces that become more distorted and emaciated from minute to minute.  One of the patients can no longer hold back his tears; they come in floods, and as he shakes his head he sprinkles his neighbors.  Another, bleeding like a fountain, shouts, “Hey, there! have a look at me!” A young man with burning eyes yells like a soul in hell, “I’m on fire!” and he roars and blows like a furnace.

* * * * * *

Joseph is bandaged.  He thrusts a way through to me and holds out his hand:  “It isn’t serious, it seems; good-by,” he says.