. "Let's have a drink," says
Fouillade. "I'm going to be sent back," says Volpatte. Lamuse puffs and
groans.

Our comrades shout and come running, and we gather in the little square
where the church stands with its twin towers--so thoroughly mutilated
by a shell that one can no longer look it in the face.

V

Sanctuary

THE dim road which rises through the middle of the night-bound wood is
so strangely full of obstructing shadows that the deep darkness of the
forest itself might by some magic have overflowed upon it. It is the
regiment on the march, in quest of a new home.

The weighty ranks of the shadows, burdened both high and broad, hustle
each other blindly. Each wave, pushed by the following, stumbles upon
the one in front, while alongside and detached are the evolutions of
those less bulky ghosts, the N.C.O.'s. A clamor of confusion, compound
of exclamations, of scraps of chat, of words of command, of spasms of
coughing and of song, goes up from the dense mob enclosed between the
banks. To the vocal commotion is added the tramping of feet, the
jingling of bayonets in their scabbards, of cans and drinking-cups, the
rumbling and hammering of the sixty vehicles of the two
convoys--fighting and regimental--that follow the two battalions. And
such a thing is it that trudges and spreads itself over the climbing
road that, in spite of the unbounded dome of night, one welters in the
odor of a den of lions.

In the ranks one sees nothing. Sometimes, when one can lift his nose
up, by grace of an eddy in the tide, one cannot help seeing the
whiteness of a mess-tin, the blue steel of a helmet, the black steel of
a rifle. Anon, by the dazzling jet of sparks that flies from a pocket
flint-and-steel, or the red flame that expands upon the lilliputian
stem of a match, one can see beyond the vivid near relief of hands and
faces to the silhouetted and disordered groups of helmeted shoulders,
swaying like surges that would storm the sable stronghold of the night.
Then, all goes out, and while each tramping soldier's legs swing to and
fro, his eye is fixed inflexibly upon the conjectural situation of the
back that dwells in front of him.

After several halts, when we have allowed ourselves to collapse on our
haversacks at the foot of the stacked rifles--stacks that form on the
call of the whistle with feverish haste and exasperating delay, through
our blindness in that atmosphere of ink-dawn reveals itself, extends,