like cattle enclosed.

Cocon is explaining to his neighbor the arrangement and intricacy of
our trenches. He has seen a military map and made some calculations. In
the sector occupied by our regiment there are fifteen lines of French
trenches. Some are abandoned, invaded by grass, and half leveled; the
others solidly upkept and bristling with men. These parallels are
joined up by innumerable galleries which hook and crook themselves like
ancient streets. The system is much more dense than we believe who live
inside it. On the twenty-five kilometers' width that form the army
front, one must count on a thousand kilometers of hollowed
lines--trenches and saps of all sorts. And the French Army consists of
ten such armies. There are then, on the French side, about 10,000
kilometers [note 2] of trenches, and as much again on the German side.
And the French front is only about one-eighth of the whole war-front of
the world.

Thus speaks Cocon, and he ends by saying to his neighbor, "In all that
lot, you see what we are, us chaps?"

Poor Barque's head droops. His face, bloodless as a slum child's, is
underlined by a red goatee that punctuates his hair like an apostrophe:
"Yes, it's true, when you come to think of it. What's a soldier, or
even several soldiers?--Nothing, and less than nothing, in the whole
crowd; and so we see ourselves lost, drowned, like the few drops of
blood that we are among all this flood of men and things."

Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a chance
of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an undertone: "He
was coming along with two horses--Fs-s-s--a shell; and he's only one
horse left."

"You get fed up with it," says Volpatte.

"But you stick it," growls Barque.

"You've got to," says Paradis.

"Why?" asks Marthereau, without conviction.

"No need for a reason, as long as we've got to."

"There is no reason," Lamuse avers.

"Yes, there is," says Cocon. "It's--or rather, there are several."

"Shut it up! Much better to have no reason, as long as we've got to
stick it."

"All the same," comes the hollow voice of Blaire, who lets no chance
slip of airing his pet phrase--"All the same, they'd like to steal the
very skin off us!"

"At the beginning of it," says Tirette, "I used to think about a heap
of things. I considered and calculated. Now, I don't think any more."

"Nor me either."

"Nor me."

"I've never tried to."

"You're not such a foo