“And then,” said the comrade at our side, whom we could not recognize even by his voice, “to-morrow it begins again.  It began again the day before yesterday, and all the days before that!”

With an effort as if he was tearing the ground, the chasseur dragged his body out of the earth where he had molded a depression like an oozing coffin, and sat in the hole.  He blinked his eyes and tried to shake the balance of mud from his face, and said, “We shall come out of it again this time.  And who knows, p’raps we shall come out of it again to-morrow!  Who knows?”

Paradis, with his back bent under mats of earth and clay, was trying to convey his idea that the war cannot be imagined or measured in terms of time and space.  “When one speaks of the whole war,” he said, thinking aloud, “it’s as if you said nothing at all—­the words are strangled.  We’re here, and we look at it all like blind men.”

A bass voice rolled to us from a little farther away, “No, one cannot imagine it.”

At these words a burst of harsh laughter tore itself from some one.  “How could you imagine it, to begin with, if you hadn’t been there?”

“You’d have to be mad,” said the chasseur.

Paradis leaned over a sprawling outspread mass beside him and said, “Are you asleep?”

“No, but I’m not going to budge.”  The smothered and terror-struck mutter issued instantly from the mass that was covered with a thick and slimy horse-cloth, so indented that it seemed to have been trampled.  “I’ll tell you why.  I believe my belly’s shot through.  But I’m not sure, and I daren’t find out.”

“Let’s see—­”

“No, not yet,” says the man.  “I’d rather stop on a bit like this.”

The others, dragging themselves on their elbows, began to make splashing movements, by way of casting off the clammy infernal covering that weighed them down.  The paralysis of cold was passing away from the knot of sufferers, though the light no longer made any progress over the great irregular marsh of the lower plain.  The desolation proceeded, but not the day.

Then he who spoke sorrowfully, like a bell, said.  “It’ll be no good telling about it, eh?  They wouldn’t believe you; not out of malice or through liking to pull your leg, but because they couldn’t.  When you say to ’em later, if you live to say it, ’We were on a night job and we got shelled and we were very nearly drowned in mud,’ they’ll say, ‘Ah!’ And p’raps they’ll say.  ’You didn’t have a very spicy time on the job.’  And that’s all.  No one can know it.  Only us.”

“No, not even us, not even us!” some one cried.

“That’s what I say, too.  We shall forget—­we’re forgetting already, my boy!”

“We’ve seen too much to remember.”

“And everything we’ve seen was too much.  We’re not made to hold it all.  It takes its damned hook in all directions.  We’re too little to hold it.”