We discovered at last the cause of the maddening inactivity of the detachment’s tail—­“There’s a barrage fire beyond.”

A weird imprisoned panic seized upon the men with cries inarticulate and gestures stillborn.  They writhed upon the spot.  But little shelter as the incipient trench afforded, no one dared leave the ditch that saved us from protruding above the level of the ground, no one dared fly from death towards the traverse that should be down there.  Great were the risks of the wounded who had managed to crawl over the others, and every moment some were struck and went down again.

Fire and water fell blended everywhere.  Profoundly entangled in the supernatural din, we shook from neck to heels.  The most hideous of deaths was falling and bounding and plunging all around us in waves of light, its crashing snatched our fearfulness in all directions—­our flesh prepared itself for the monstrous sacrifice!  In that tense moment of imminent destruction, we could only remember just then how often we had already experienced it, how often undergone this outpouring of iron, and the burning roar of it, and the stench.  It is only during a bombardment that one really recalls those he has already endured.

And still, without ceasing, newly-wounded men crept over us, fleeing at any price.  In the fear that their contact evoked we groaned again, “We shan’t get out of this; nobody will get out of it.”

Suddenly a gap appeared in the compressed humanity, and those behind breathed again, for we were on the move.

We began by crawling, then we ran, bowed low in the mud and water that mirrored the flashes and the crimson gleams, stumbling and falling over submerged obstructions, ourselves resembling heavy splashing projectiles, thunder-hurled along the ground.  We arrive at the starting-place of the trench we had begun to dig.

“There’s no trench—­there’s nothing.”

In truth the eye could discern no shelter in the plain where our work had begun.  Even by the stormy flash of the rockets we could only see the plain, a huge and raging desert.  The trench could not be far away, for it had brought us here.  But which way must we steer to find it?

The rain redoubled.  We lingered a moment in mournful disappointment, gathered on a lightning-smitten and unknown shore—­and then the stampede.

Some bore to the left, some to the right, some went straight forward—­tiny groups that one only saw for a second in the heart of the thundering rain before they were separated by sable avalanches and curtains of flaming smoke.

* * * * * *

The bombardment over our heads grew less; it was chiefly over the place where we had been that it was increasing.  But it might any minute isolate everything and destroy it.

The rain became more and more torrential—­a deluge in the night.  The darkness was so deep that the star-shells only lit up slices of water-seamed obscurity, in the depths of which fleeing phantoms came and went and ran round in circles.