e of our tramping, through the funereal
consolation of our drowsiness, we heard the adjutant's ringing voice,
violently reprimanding this or the other. "Where have you seen, swine,
that there can be patriotism without hatred? Do you think one can love
his own country if he doesn't hate the others?"

When some one spoke banteringly of militarism--for no one, except
Termite, who didn't count, took the word seriously--Marcassin growled
despairingly, "French militarism and Prussian militarism, they're not
the same thing, for one's French and the other's Prussian!"

But we felt that all these wrangles only shocked and wearied him. He
was instantly and gloomily silent.

We were halted to mount guard in a part we had never seen before, and
for that reason it seemed worse than the others to us at first. We had
to scatter and run up and down the shelterless trench all night, to
avoid the plunging files of shells. That night was but one great crash
and we were strewn in the middle of it among black puddles, upon a
ghostly background of earth. We moved on again in the morning,
bemused, and the color of night. In front of the column we still heard
the cry "Forward!" Then we redoubled the violence of our effort, we
extorted some little haste from out us; and the soaked and frozen
company went on under cathedrals of cloud which collapsed in flames,
victims of a fate whose name they had no time to seek, a fate which
only let its force be felt, like God.

During the day, and much farther on, they cried "Halt!" and the
smothered sound of the march was silent. From the trench in which we
collapsed under our packs, while another lot went away, we could see as
far as a railway embankment. The far end of the loophole-pipe enframed
tumbledown dwellings and cabins, ruined gardens where the grass and the
flowers were interred, enclosures masked by palings, fragments of
masonry to which eloquent remains of posters even still clung--a corner
full of artificial details, of human things, of illusions. The railway
bank was near, and in the network of wire stretched between it and us
many bodies were fast-caught as flies.

The elements had gradually dissolved those bodies and time had worn
them out. With their dislocated gestures and point-like heads they
were but lightly hooked to the wire. For whole hours our eyes were
fixed on this country all obstructed by a machinery of wires and full
of men who were not on the ground. One, s