We came to a sort of great plain.  We halted and threw ourselves on the ground on the side of a mound, and leaned back upon it, unable to make another step.

And we moved no more, my shadowy comrades nor I. The rain splashed in our faces, streamed down our backs and chests, ran down from our knees and filled our boots.

We should perhaps be killed or taken prisoners when day came.  But we thought no more of anything.  We could do no more; we knew no more.

24

The Dawn

We are waiting for daylight in the place where we sank to the ground.  Sinister and slow it comes, chilling and dismal, and expands upon the livid landscape.

The rain has ceased to fall—­there is none left in the sky.  The leaden plain and its mirrors of sullied water seem to issue not only from the night but from the sea.

Drowsy or half asleep, sometimes opening our eyes only to close them again, we attend the incredible renewal of light, paralyzed with cold and broken with fatigue.

Where are the trenches?

We see lakes, and between the lakes there are lines of milky and motionless water.  There is more water even than we had thought.  It has taken everything and spread everywhere, and the prophecy of the men in the night has come true.  There are no more trenches; those canals are the trenches enshrouded.  It is a universal flood.  The battlefield is not sleeping; it is dead.  Life may be going on down yonder perhaps, but we cannot see so far.

Swaying painfully, like a sick man, in the terrible encumbering clasp of my greatcoat, I half raise myself to look at it all.  There are three monstrously shapeless forms beside me.  One of them—­it is Paradis, in an amazing armor of mud, with a swelling at the waist that stands for his cartridge pouches—­gets up also.  The others are asleep, and make no movement.

And what is this silence, too, this prodigious silence?  There is no sound, except when from time to time a lump of earth slips into the water, in the middle of this fantastic paralysis of the world.  No one is firing.  There are no shells, for they would not burst.  There are no bullets, either, for the men—­

Ah, the men!  Where are the men?

We see them gradually.  Not far from us there are some stranded and sleeping hulks so molded in mud from head to foot that they are almost transformed into inanimate objects.

Some distance away I can make out others, curled up and clinging like snails all along a rounded embankment, from which they have partly slipped back into the water.  It is a motionless rank of clumsy lumps, of bundles placed side by side, dripping water and mud, and of the same color as the soil with which they are blended.

I make an effort to break the silence.  To Paradis, who also is looking that way, I say, “Are they dead?”

“We’ll go and see presently,” he says in a low voice; “stop here a bit yet.  We shall have the heart to go there by and by.”