Now, the noise and the heat are raging behind us and growing feebler, and my neighbor mutters in his beard, “And that idiot that said my lamp would be seen!”

And here is the free air!  The sky is a very dark blue, of the same color as the earth and little lighter.  The rain becomes worse and worse, and walking is laborious in the heavy slime.  The whole boot sinks in, and it is a labor of acute pain to withdraw the foot every time.  Hardly anything is left visible in the night, but at the exit from the hole we see a disorder of beams which flounder in the widened trench—­some demolished dugout.

Just at this moment, a searchlight’s unearthly arm that was swinging through space stops and falls on us, and we find that the tangle of uprooted and sunken posts and shattered framing is populous with dead soldiers.  Quite close to me, the head of a kneeling body hangs on its back by an uncertain thread; a black veneer, edged with clotted drops, covers the cheek.  Another body so clasps a post in its arms that it has only half fallen.  Another, lying in the form of a circle, has been stripped by the shell, and his back and belly are laid bare.  Another, outstretched on the edge of the heap, has thrown his hand across our path; and in this place where there no traffic except by night—­for the trench is blocked just there by the earth-fall and inaccessible by day—­every one treads on that hand.  By the searchlight’s shaft I saw it clearly, fleshless and worn, a sort of withered fin.

The rain is raging and the sound of its streaming dominates everything—­a horror of desolation.  We feel the water on our flesh as if the deluge had washed our clothes away.

We enter the open trench, and the embrace of night and storm resumes the sole possession of this confusion of corpses, stranded and cramped on a square of earth as on a raft.

The wind freezes the drops of sweat on our foreheads.  It is near midnight.  For six hours now we have marched in the increasing burden of the mud.  This is the time when the Paris theaters are constellated with electroliers and blossoming with lamps; when they are filled with luxurious excitement, with the rustle of skirts, with merrymaking and warmth; when a fragrant and radiant multitude, chatting, laughing, smiling, applauding, expanding. feels itself pleasantly affected by the cleverly graduated emotions which the comedy evokes, and lolls in contented enjoyment of the rich and splendid pageants of military glorification that crowd the stage of the music-hall.

“Aren’t we there?  Nom de Dieu, shan’t we ever get there?” The groan is breathed by the long procession that tosses about in these crevices of the earth, carrying rifles and shovels and pickaxes under the eternal torrent.  We march and march.  We are drunk with fatigue, and roll to this side and that.  Stupefied and soaked, we strike with our shoulders a substance as sodden as ourselves.

“Halt!”—­“Are we there?”—­“Ah, yes, we’re there!”