“We’re in front of the first lines,” they whisper round me.  “No.” murmur other voices, “we’re just behind.”

No one knows.  The rain still falls, though less fiercely than at some moments on the march.  But what matters the rain!  We have spread ourselves out on the ground.  Now that our backs and limbs rest in the yielding mud, we are so comfortable that we are unconcerned about the rain that pricks our faces and drives through to our flesh, indifferent to the saturation of the bed that contains us.

But we get hardly time enough to draw breath.  They are not so imprudent as to let us bury ourselves in sleep.  We must set ourselves to incessant labor.  It is two o’clock of the morning; in four hours more it will be too light for us to stay here.  There is not a minute to lose.

“Every man,” they say to us, “must dig five feet in length, two and a half feet in width, and two and three-quarter feet in depth.  That makes fifteen feet in length for each team.  And I advise you to get into it; the sooner it’s done, the sooner you’ll leave.”

We know the pious claptrap.  It is not recorded in the annals of the regiment that a trenching fatigue-party ever once got away before the moment when it became absolutely necessary to quit the neighborhood if they were not to be seen, marked and destroyed along with the work of their hands.

We murmur, “Yes, yes—­all right; it’s not worth saying.  Go easy.”

But everybody applies himself to the job courageously, except for some invincible sleepers whose nap will involve them later in superhuman efforts.

We attack the first layer of the new line—­little mounds of earth, stringy with grass.  The ease and speed with which the work begins—­like all entrenching work in free soil—­foster the illusion that it will soon be finished, that we shall be able to sleep in the cavities we have scooped:  and thus a certain eagerness revives.

But whether by reason of the noise of the shovels, or because some men are chatting almost aloud, in spite of reproofs, our activity wakes up a rocket, whose flaming vertical line rattles suddenly on our right.

“Lie down!” Every man flattens himself, and the rocket balances and parades its huge pallor over a sort of field of the dead.

As soon as it is out one hears the men, in places and then all along, detach themselves from their secretive stillness, get up, and resume the task with more discretion.

Soon another star-shell tosses aloft its long golden stalk, and still more brightly illuminates the flat and motionless line of trenchmakers.  Then another and another.

Bullets rend the air around us, and we hear a cry, “Some one wounded!” He passes, supported by comrades.  We can just see the group of men who are going away, dragging one of their number.

The place becomes unwholesome.  We stoop and crouch, and some are scratching at the earth on their knees.  Others are working full length; they toil, and turn, and turn again, like men in nightmares.  The earth, whose first layer was light to lift, becomes muddy and sticky; it is hard to handle, and clings to the tool like glue.  After every shovelful the blade must be scraped.