's the chiefs."

We say it and we should repeat it if we were not up again and swept
away in the hustle of a fresh departure, and thrown back upon more
immediate and important anxieties.

* * * * * *

We do not know where we are.

We have marched all night. More weariness bends our spines again, more
obscurity hums in our heads. By following the bed of a valley, we have
found trenches again, and then men. These splayed and squelched
alleys, with their fat and sinking sandbags, their props which rot like
limbs, flow into wider pockets where activity prevails--battalion H.Q.,
or dressing-stations. About midnight we saw, through the golden line
of a dugout's half-open door, some officers seated at a white table--a
cloth or a map. Some one cries, "They're lucky!" The company officers
are exposed to dangers as we are, but only in attacks and reliefs. We
suffer long. They have neither the vigil at the loophole, nor the
knapsack, nor the fatigues. What always lasts is greater.

And now the walls of flabby flagstones and the open-mouthed caves have
begun again. Morning rises, long and narrow as our lot. We reach a
busy trench-crossing. A stench catches my throat: some cess-pool into
which these streets suspended in the earth empty their sewage? No, we
see rows of stretchers, each one swollen. There is a tent there of
gray canvas, which flaps like a flag, and on its fluttering wall the
dawn lights up a bloody cross.

* * * * * *

Sometimes, when we are high enough for our eyes to unbury themselves, I
can dimly see some geometrical lines, so confused, so desolated by
distance, that I do not know if it is our country or the other; even
when one sees he does not know. Our looks are worn away in looking.
We do not see, we are powerless to people the world. We all have
nothing in common but eyes of evening and a soul of night.

And always, always, in these trenches whose walls run down like waves,
with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers go
forward endlessly, towing each other. They go as quickly as they can,
as if the walls were going to close upon them. They are bowed as if
they were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which they
carry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they might
rocks in hell. From minute to minute we are filling the places of the
obliterated hosts who have