and then to the quarry, which
daybreak was washing and fouling and making its desolation more
complete. Fatigue was gathering darkly within us and abating our pace.
Faces appeared stiff and wan, and as though they were seen through
gratings. We were surrounded by cries of "Forward!" thrown from all
directions between the twilight of the sky and the night of the earth.
It took a greater effort every time to tear ourselves away from the
halts.

We were not the only regiment in movement in these latitudes. The
twilight depths were full. Across the spaces that surrounded the
quarry men were passing without ceasing and without limit, their feet
breaking and furrowing the earth like plows. And one guessed that the
shadows also were full of hosts going as we were to the four corners of
the unknown. Then the clay and its thousand barren ruts, these
corpse-like fields, fell away. Under the ashen tints of early day,
fog-banks of men descended the slopes. From the top I saw nearly the
whole regiment rolling into the deeps. As once of an evening in the
days gone by, I had a perception of the multitude's immensity and the
threat of its might, that might which surpasses all and is impelled by
invisible mandates.

We stopped and drew breath again; and on the gloomy edge of this gulf
some soldiers even amused themselves by inciting Termite to speak of
militarism and anti-militarism. I saw faces which laughed, through
their black and woeful pattern of fatigue, around the little man who
gesticulated in impotence. Then we had to set off again.

We had never passed that way but in the dark, and we did not recognize
the scenes now that we saw them. From the lane which we descended,
holding ourselves back, to gain the trench, we saw for the first time
the desert through which we had so often passed--plains and lagoons
unlimited.

The waterlogged open country, with its dispirited pools and their
smoke-like islets of trees, seemed nothing but a reflection of the
leaden, cloud-besmirched sky. The walls of the trenches, pallid as
ice-floes, marked with their long, sinuous crawling where they had been
slowly torn from the earth by the shovels. These embossings and canals
formed a complicated and incalculable network, smudged near at hand by
bodies and wreckage; dreary and planetary in the distance. One could
make out the formal but hazy stakes and posts, aligned in the distance
to the end of sight; and here and there the swel