Hurry up, so far.
Afterwards there'll be a good yarn to tell in the sewer where the
boys are, about what we did to the Boches."
19
Bombardment
WE are in the flat country, a vast mistiness, but above it is dark
blue. The end of the night is marked by a little falling snow which
powders our shoulders and the folds in our sleeves. We are marching
in fours, hooded. We seem in the turbid twilight to be the wandering
survivors of one Northern district who are trekking to another.
We have followed a road and have crossed the ruins of
Ablain-Saint-Nazaire. We have had confused glimpses of its whitish
heaps of houses and the dim spider-webs of its suspended roofs. The
village is so long that although full night buried us in it we saw
its last buildings beginning to pale in the frost of dawn. Through
the grating of a cellar on the edge of this petrified ocean's waves,
we made out the fire kept going by the custodians of the dead town.
We have paddled in swampy fields, lost ourselves in silent places
where the mud seized us by the feet, we have dubiously regained our
balance and our bearings again on another road, the one which leads
from Carency to Souchez. The tall bordering poplars are shivered and
their trunks mangled; in one place the road is an enormous colonnade
of trees destroyed. Then, marching with us on both sides, we see
through the shadows ghostly dwarfs of trees, wide-cloven like
spreading palms; botched and jumbled into round blocks or long
strips; doubled upon themselves, as if they knelt.
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