biting wintry wind whips our skin, sweeps away and
scatters our words and our sighs.

At last the sun pierces the reek that spreads over us and soaks what it
touches, and something like a fairy glade opens out in the midst of
this gloom terrestrial. The regiment stretches itself and wakes up in
truth, with slow-lifted faces to the gilded silver of the earliest
rays. Quickly, then, the sun grows fiery, and now it is too hot. In the
ranks we pant and sweat, and our grumbling is louder even than just
now, when our teeth were chattering and the fog wet-sponged our hands
and faces.

It is a chalk country through which we are passing on this torrid
forenoon--"They mend this road with lime, the dirty devils!" The road
has become blinding--a long-drawn cloud of dessicated chalk and dust
that rises high above our columns and powders us as we go. Faces turn
red, and shine as though varnished; some of the full-blooded ones might
be plastered with vaseline. Cheeks and foreheads are coated with a
rusty paste which agglutinates and cracks. Feet lose their dubious
likeness to feet and might have paddled in a mason's mortar-trough.
Haversacks and rifles are powdered in white, and our legion leaves to
left and right a long milky track on the bordering grass. And to crown
all--"To the right! A convoy!"

We bear to the right, hurriedly, and not without bumpings. The convoy
of lorries, a long chain of foursquare and huge projectiles, rolling up
with diabolical din, hurls itself along the road. Curse it! One after
another, they gather up the thick carpet of white powder that
upholsters the ground and send it broadcast over our shoulders! Now we
are garbed in a stuff of light gray and our faces are pallid masks,
thickest on the eyebrows and mustaches, on beards, and the cracks of
wrinkles. Though still ourselves, we look like strange old men.

"When we're old buffers, we shall be as ugly as this," says Tirette.

"Tu craches blanc," declares Biquet. [note 1]

When a halt puts us out of action, you might take us for rows of
plaster statues, with some dirty indications of humanity showing
through.

We move again, silent and chagrined. Every step becomes hard to
complete. Our faces assume congealed and fixed grimaces under the wan
leprosy of dust. The unending effort contracts us and quite fills us
with dismal weariness and disgust.

We espy at last the long-sought oasis. Beyond a hill, on a still higher
one, some slated roofs peep fr