fluttered down like leaves and petals onto the
body of the great dead soldier.

"Where's his cap, that he thought so much of?" groaned his orderly,
Aubeau, looking in all directions.

"Up there, to be sure: I'll fetch it," said Termite.

The comical man went for the relic. He mounted the parapet in his
turn, coolly, but bending low. We saw him ferreting about, frail as a
poor monkey on the terrible crest. At last he put his hand on the cap
and jumped into the trench. A smile sparkled in his eyes and in the
middle of his beard, and his brass "cold meat ticket" jingled on his
shaggy wrist.

They took the body away. The men carried it and a third followed with
the cap. One of us said, "The war's over for him!" And during the
dead man's recessional we were mustered, and we continued to draw
nearer to the unknown. But everything seemed to recede as fast as we
advanced, even events.

* * * * * *

We wandered five days, six days, in the lines, almost without sleeping.
We stood for hours, for half-nights and half-days, waiting for ways to
be clear that we could not see. Unceasingly they made us go back on
our tracks and begin over again. We mounted guard in trenches, we
fitted ourselves into some stripped and sinister corner which stood out
against a charred twilight or against fire. We were condemned to see
the same abysses always.

For two nights we bent fiercely to the mending of an old third-line
trench above the ruin of its former mending. We repaired the long
skeleton, soft and black, of its timbers. From that dried-up drain we
besomed the rubbish of equipment, of petrified weapons, of rotten
clothes and of victuals, of a sort of wreckage of forest and
house--filthy, incomparably filthy, infinitely filthy. We worked by
night and hid by day. The only light for us was the heavy dawn of
evening when they dragged us from sleep. Eternal night covered the
earth.

After the labor, as soon as daybreak began to replace night with
melancholy, we buried ourselves methodically in the depth of the
caverns there. Only a deadened murmur penetrated to them, but the rock
moved by reason of the earthquakes. When some one lighted his pipe, by
that gleam we looked at each other. We were fully equipped; we could
start away at any minute; it was forbidden to take off the heavy
jingling chain of cartridges around us.

I heard some one say, "In _my_ country there are fields, and p