It is a pilgrimage of peril; not that we should have far to go—­Souchez is just there.  For six months we have lived and worked in the trenches almost within hail of the village.  We have only to climb straight from here on to the Bethune road along which the trench creeps, the road honeycombed underneath by our shelters, and descend it for four or five hundred yards as it dips down towards Souchez.  But all that ground is under regular and terrible attention.  Since their recoil, the Germans have constantly sent huge shells into it.  Their thunder shakes us in our caverns from time to time, and we see, high above the scarps, now here now there, the great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the piled columns of smoke, as high as churches.  Why do they bombard Souchez?  One cannot say why, for there is no longer anybody or anything in the village so often taken and retaken, that we have so fiercely wrested from each other.

But this morning a dense fog enfolds us, and by favor of the great curtain that the sky throws over the earth one might risk it.  We are sure at least of not being seen.  The fog hermetically closes the perfected retina of the Sausage that must be somewhere up there, enshrouded in the white wadding that raises its vast wall of partition between our lines and those observation posts of Lens and Angres, whence the enemy spies upon us.

“Right you are!” I say to Poterloo.

Adjutant Barthe, informed of our project, wags his head up and down, and lowers his eyelids in token that he does not see.

We hoist ourselves out of the trench, and behold us both, upright, on the Bethune road!

It is the first time I have walked there during the day.  I have never seen it, except from afar, the terrible road that we have so often traveled or crossed in leaps, bowed down in the darkness, and under the whistling of missiles.

“Well, are you coming, old man?”

After some paces, Poterloo has stopped in the middle of the road, where the fog like cotton-wool unravels itself into pendent fragments, and there he dilates his sky-blue eyes and half opens his scarlet mouth.

“Ah, la, la!  Ah, la, la!” he murmurs.  When I turn to him he points to the road, shakes his head and says, “This is it, Bon Dieu, to think this is it!  This bit where we are, I know it so well that if I shut my eyes I can see it as it was, exactly.  Old chap, it’s awful to see it again like that.  It was a beautiful road, planted all the way along with big trees.

“And now, what is it?  Look at it—­a sort of long thing without a soul—­sad, sad.  Look at these two trenches on each side, alive; this ripped-up paving, bored with funnels; these trees uprooted, split, scorched, broken like faggots, thrown all ways, pierced by bullets—­look, this pock-marked pestilence, here!  Ah, my boy, my boy, you can’t imagine how it is disfigured, this road!” And he goes forward, seeing some new amazement at every step.