sunk into holes, and it’s a man-trap.  Where there’s no more hurdles there’s two yards deep of water.  Your rifle?  You couldn’t pull it out again when you’d stuck it in.  Look at those men, there.  They’ve cut off all the bottom half of their great-coats—­hard lines on the pockets—­to help ’em get clear, and also because they hadn’t strength to drag a weight like that.  Dumas’ coat, we were able to pull it off him, and it weighed a good eighty pounds; we could just lift it, two of us, with both our hands.  Look—­him with the bare legs; it’s taken everything off him, his trousers, his drawers, his boots, all dragged off by the mud.  One’s never seen that, never.”

Scattered and straggling, the herd takes flight in a fever of fear, their feet pulling huge stumps of mud out of the ground.  We watch the human flotsam fade away, and the lumps of them diminish, immured in enormous clothes.

We get up, and at once the icy wind makes us tremble like trees.  Slowly we veer towards the mass formed by two men curiously joined, leaning shoulder to shoulder, and each with an arm round the neck of the other.  Is it the hand-to-hand fight of two soldiers who have overpowered each other in death and still hold their own, who can never again lose their grip?  No; they are two men who recline upon each other so as to sleep.  As they might not spread themselves on the falling earth that was ready to spread itself on them, they have supported each other, clasping each other’s shoulder; and thus plunged in the ground up to their knees, they have gone to sleep.

We respect their stillness, and withdraw from the twin statue of human wretchedness.

Soon we must halt ourselves.  We have expected too much of our strength and can go no farther.  It is not yet ended.  We collapse once more in a churned corner, with a noise as if one shot a load of dung.

From time to time we open our eyes.  Some men are steering for us, reeling.  They lean over us and speak in low and weary tones.  One of them says, “Sie sind todt.  Wir bleiben hier.” (They’re dead.  We’ll stay here.) The other says, “Ja,” like a sigh.

But they see us move, and at once they sink in front of us.  The man with the toneless voice says to us in French, “We surrender,” and they do not move.  Then they give way entirely, as if this was the relief, the end of their torture; and one of them whose face is patterned in mud like a savage tattooed, smiles slightly.

“Stay there,” says Paradis, without moving the head that he leans backward upon a hillock; “presently you shall go with us if you want.”

“Yes,” says the German, “I’ve had enough.”  We make no reply, and he says, “And the others too?”

“Yes,” says Paradis, “let them stop too, if they like.”  There are four of them outstretched on the ground.  The death-rattle has got one of them.  It is like a sobbing song that rises from him.  The others then half straighten themselves, kneeling round him, and roll great eyes in their muck-mottled faces.  We get up and watch the scene.  But the rattle dies out, and the blackened throat which alone in all the big body pulsed like a little bird, is still.