Down yonder we hear a droning chant—­“Two shovels, one pick, two shovels, one pick “The file trickles along to the tool-store, stagnates at the door, and departs, bristling with implements.

“Everybody here?  Gee up!” says the sergeant.  Downward and rolling, we go forward.  We know not where we go.  We know nothing, except that the night and the earth are blending in the same abyss.

As we emerge into the nude twilight from the trench, we see it already black as the crater of a dead volcano.  Great gray clouds, storm-charged, hang from the sky.  The plain, too, is gray in the pallid light; the grass is muddy, and all slashed with water.  The things which here and there seem only distorted limbs are denuded trees.  We cannot see far around us in the damp reek; besides, we only look downwards at the mud in which we slide—­“Porridge!”

Going across country we knead and pound a sticky paste which spreads out and flows back from every step—­“Chocolate cream—­coffee creams!”

On the stony parts, the wiped-out ruins of roads that have become barren as the fields, the marching troop breaks through a layer of slime into a flinty conglomerate that grates and gives way under our iron-shod soles—­“Seems as if we were walking on buttered toast!”

On the slope of a knoll sometimes, the mud is black and thick and deep-rutted, like that which forms around the horse-ponds in villages, and in these ruts there are lakes and puddles and ponds, whose edges seem to be in rags.

The pleasantries of the wags, who in the early freshness of the journey had cried, “Quack, quack,” when they went through the water, are now becoming rare and gloomy; gradually the jokers are damped down.  The rain begins to fall heavily.  The daylight dwindles, and the confusion that is space contracts.  The last lingering light welters on the ground and in the water.

A steaming silhouette of men like monks appears through the rain in the west.  It is a company of the 204th, wrapped in tent-cloths.  As we go by we see the pale and shrunken faces and the dark noses of these dripping prowlers before they disappear.  The track we are following through the faint grass of the fields is itself a sticky field streaked with countless parallel ruts, all plowed in the same line by the feet and the wheels of those who go to the front and those who go to the rear.

We have to jump over gaping trenches, and this is not always easy, for the edges have become soft and slippery, and earth-falls have widened them.  Fatigue, too, begins to bear upon our shoulders.  Vehicles cross our path with a great noise and splashing.  Artillery limbers prance by and spray us heavily.  The motor lorries are borne on whirling circles of water around the wheels, with spirting tumultuous spokes.

As the darkness increases, the jolted vehicles and the horses’ necks and the profiles of the riders with their floating cloaks and slung carbines stand out still more fantastically against the misty floods from the sky.  Here, there is a block of ammunition carts of the artillery.  The horses are standing and trampling as we go by.  We hear the creaking of axles, shouts, disputes, commands which collide, and the roar of the ocean of rain.  Over the confused scuffle we can see steam rising from the buttocks of the teams and the cloaks of the horsemen.