stay there and breathe and live a little;
we are calm, thanks to that faculty we have of never seeing either the
past or the future.

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XIII

WHITHER GOEST THOU?

But soon a shiver has seized all of us.

"Listen! It's stopped! Listen!"

The whistle of bullets has completely ceased, and the artillery also.
The lull is fantastic. The longer it lasts the more it pierces us with
the uneasiness of beasts. We lived in eternal noise; and now that it
is hiding, it shakes and rouses us, and would drive us mad.

"What's that?"

We rub our eyelids and open wide our eyes. We hoist our heads with no
precaution above the crumbled parapet. We question each other--"D'you
see?"

No doubt about it; the shadows are moving along the ground wherever one
looks. There is no point in the distance where they are not moving.

Some one says at last:--

"Why, it's the Boches, to be sure!"

And then we recognize on the sloping plain the immense geographical
form of the army that is coming upon us!

* * * * * *

Behind and in front of us together, a terrible crackle bursts forth and
makes somber captives of us in the depth of a valley of flames, and
flames which illuminate the plain of men marching over the plain. They
reveal them afar, in incalculable number, with the first ranks
detaching themselves, wavering a little, and forming again, the chalky
soil a series of points and lines like something written!

Gloomy stupefaction makes us dumb in face of that living immensity.
Then we understand that this host whose fountain-head is out of sight
is being frightfully cannonaded by our 75's; the shells set off behind
us and arrive in front of us. In the middle of the lilliputian ranks
the giant smoke-clouds leap like hellish gods. We see the flashes of
the shells which are entering that flesh scattered over the earth. It
is smashed and burned entirely in places, and that nation advances like
a brazier.

Without a stop it overflows towards us. Continually the horizon
produces new waves. We hear a vast and gentle murmur rise. With their
tearing lights and their dull glimmers they resemble in the distance a
whole town making festival in the evening.

We can do nothing against the magnitude of that attack, the greatness
of that sum total. When a gun has fired short, we see more clearly the
littleness of each shot. Fire and