bottom of everything. I
was beginning to sleep, to go away from myself, lulled by a voice which
sought in vain the number of the days we had been on the move, and was
repeating the names of the nights--Thursday, Friday, Saturday--when the
man with the pointed light returns, demands a gang, and I set off with
the others. It is so again for a third time. As soon as we are
outside, the night, which seems to lie in wait for us, sends us a
squall, with its thunderous destruction of space; it scatters us; then
we are drawn together and joined up. We carry thick planks, two by
two; and then piles of sacks which blind the bearers with a plastery
dust and make them reel like masts.

Then the last time, the most terrible, it was wire. Each of us takes
into his hands a great hoop of coiled wire, as tall as ourselves, and
weighing over sixty pounds. When one carries it, the supple wheel
stretches out like an animal; it is set dancing by the least movement,
it works into the flesh of the shoulder, and strikes one's feet. Mine
tries to cling to me and pull me up and throw me to the ground. With
this malignantly heavy thing, animated with barbarous and powerful
movement, I cross the ruins of a railway station, all stones and beams.
We clamber up an embankment which slips away and avoids us, we drag and
push the rebellious and implacable burden. It cannot be reached, that
receding height. But we reach it, all the same.

Ah, I am a normal man! I cling to life, and I have the consciousness
of duty. But at that moment I called from the bottom of my heart for
the bullet which would have delivered me from life.

We return, with empty hands, in a sort of sinister comfort. I
remember, as we came in, a neighbor said to me--or to some one else:

"Sheets of corrugated iron are worse."

The fatigues have to be stopped at dawn, although the engineers protest
against the masses of stores which uselessly fill the depot.

We sleep from six to seven in the morning. In the last traces of night
we emigrate from the cave, blinking like owls.

"Where's the juice?"[1] we ask.

[Footnote 1: Coffee.]

There is none. The cooks are not there, nor the mess people. And they
reply:--

"Forward!"

In the dull and pallid morning, on the approaches to a village, there
appear gardens, which no longer have human shape. Instead of
cultivation there are puddles and mud. All is burned or drowned, and
the walls scattered like bones everywh