We look at each other, and our eyes fall also on the others who came and fell down here.  Their faces spell such weariness that they are no longer faces so much as something dirty, disfigured and bruised, with blood-shot eyes.  Since the beginning we have seen each other in all manner of shapes and appearances, and yet—­we do not know each other.

Paradis turns his head and looks elsewhere.

Suddenly I see him seized with trembling.  He extends an arm enormously caked in mud.  “There—­there—­” he says.

On the water which overflows from a stretch particularly cross-seamed and gullied, some lumps are floating, some round-backed reefs.

We drag ourselves to the spot.  They are drowned men.  Their arms and heads are submerged.  On the surface of the plastery liquid appear their backs and the straps of their accouterments.  Their blue cloth trousers are inflated, with the feet attached askew upon the ballooning legs, like the black wooden feet on the shapeless legs of marionettes.  From one sunken head the hair stands straight up like water-weeds.  Here is a face which the water only lightly touches; the head is beached on the marge, and the body disappears in its turbid tomb.  The face is lifted skyward.  The eyes are two white holes; the mouth is a black hole.  The mask’s yellow and puffed-up skin appears soft and creased, like dough gone cold.

They are the men who were watching there, and could not extricate themselves from the mud.  All their efforts to escape over the sticky escarpment of the trench that was slowly and fatally filling with water only dragged them still more into the depth.  They died clinging to the yielding support of the earth.

There, our first lines are; and there, the first German lines, equally silent and flooded.  On our way to these flaccid ruins we pass through the middle of what yesterday was the zone of terror, the awful space on whose threshold the fierce rush of our last attack was forced to stop, the No Man’s Land which bullets and shells had not ceased to furrow for a year and a half, where their crossed fire during these latter days had furiously swept the ground from one horizon to the other.

Now, it is a field of rest.  The ground is everywhere dotted with beings who sleep or who are on the way to die, slowly moving, lifting an arm, lifting the head.

The enemy trench is completing the process of foundering into itself, among great marshy undulations and funnel-holes, shaggy with mud:  it forms among them a line of pools and wells.  Here and there we can see the still overhanging banks begin to move, crumble, and fail down.  In one place we can lean against it.

In this bewildering circle of filth there are no bodies.  But there, worse than a body, a solitary arm protrudes, bare and white as a stone, from a hole which dimly shows on the other side of the water.  The man has been buried in his dug-out and has had only the time to thrust out his arm.