Quite near, we notice that some mounds of earth aligned along the ruined ramparts of this deep-drowned ditch are human.  Are they dead—­or asleep?  We do not know; in any case, they rest.

Are they German or French?  We do not know.  One of them has opened his eyes, and looks at us with swaying head.  We say to him, “French?”—­and then, “Deutsch?” He makes no reply, but shuts his eyes again and relapses into oblivion.  We never knew what he was.

We cannot decide the identity of these beings, either by their clothes, thickly covered with filth, or by their head-dress, for they are bareheaded or swathed in woolens under their liquid and offensive cowls; or by their weapons, for they either have no rifles or their hands rest lightly on something they have dragged along, a shapeless and sticky mass, like to a sort of fish.

All these men of corpse-like faces who are before us and behind us, at the limit of their strength, void of speech as of will, all these earth-charged men who you would say were carrying their own winding-sheets, are as much alike as if they were naked.  Out of the horror of the night apparitions are issuing from this side and that who are clad in exactly the same uniform of misery and mud.

It is the end of all.  For the moment it is the prodigious finish, the epic cessation of the war.

I once used to think that the worst hell in war was the flame of shells; and then for long I thought it was the suffocation of the caverns which eternally confine us.  But it is neither of these.  Hell is water.

The wind is rising, and its icy breath goes through our flesh.  On the wrecked and dissolving plain, flecked with bodies between its worm-shaped chasms of water, among the islands of motionless men stuck together like reptiles, in this flattening and sinking chaos there are some slight indications of movement.  We see slowly stirring groups and fragments of groups, composed of beings who bow under the weight of their coats and aprons of mud, who trail themselves along, disperse, and crawl about in the depths of the sky’s tarnished light.  The dawn is so foul that one would say the day was already done.

These survivors are migrating across the desolated steppe, pursued by an unspeakable evil which exhausts and bewilders them.  They are lamentable objects; and some, when they are fully seen, are dramatically ludicrous, for the whelming mud from which they still take flight has half unclothed them.

As they pass by their glances go widely around.  They look at us, and discovering men in us they cry through the wind, “It’s worse down yonder than it is here.  The chaps are falling into the holes, and you can’t pull them out.  All them that trod on the edge of a shell-hole last night, they’re dead.  Down there where we’re coming from you can see a head in the ground, working its arms, embedded.  There’s a hurdle-path that’s given way in places and the hurdles have