Here there is a further halt. We mark time, and hear the artillery
observer shout his commands, which the telephonist buried beside him
picks up and repeats: "First gun, same sight; two-tenths to left;
three a minute!"
Some of us have risked our heads over the edge of the bank and have
glimpsed for the space of the lightning's flash all the field of
battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the
morning. I saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind
seemed to be driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places
by a more pointed billow of smoke.
Where the sun and the clouds trail patches of black and of white,
the immense space sparkles dully from point to point where our
batteries are firing, and I saw it one moment entirely spangled with
short-lived flashes. Another minute, part of the field grew dark
under a steamy and whitish film, a sort of hurricane of snow.
Afar, on the evil, endless, and half-ruined fields, caverned like
cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of
torn paper; and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim
rows of vertical marks, close together and underlined, like the
straight strokes of a written page--these are the roads and their
trees. Delicate meandering lines streak the plain backward and
forward and rule it in squares, and these windings are stippled with
men.
We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human
points who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on
the plain in the horrible face of the flying firmament.
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