My spell of vigil is finished, and the other sentinels, enveloped in
damp and trickling tent-cloths, with their stripes and plasters of
mud and their livid jaws, disengage themselves from the soil wherein
they are molded, bestir themselves, and come down. For us, it is
rest until evening.
We yawn and stroll. We see a comrade pass and then another. Officers
go to and fro, armed with periscopes and telescopes. We feel our
feet again, and begin once more to live. The customary remarks cross
and clash; and were it not for the dilapidated outlook, the sunken
lines of the trench that buries us on the hillside, and the veto on
our voices, we might fancy ourselves in the rear lines. But
lassitude weighs upon all of us, our faces are jaundiced and the
eyelids reddened; through long watching we look as if we had been
weeping. For several days now we have all of us been sagging and
growing old.
One after another the men of my squad have made a confluence at a
curve in the trench. They pile themselves where the soil is only
chalky, and where, above the crust that bristles with severed roots,
the excavations have exposed some beds of white stones that had lain
in the darkness for over a hundred thousand years.
There in the widened fairway, Bertrand's squad beaches itself. It is
much reduced this time, for beyond the losses of the other night, we
no longer have Poterloo, killed in a relief, nor Cadilhac. wounded
in the leg by a splinter the same evening as Poterloo, nor Tirioir
nor Tulacque who have been sent back, the one for dysentery, and the
other for pneumonia, which is taking an ugly turn--as he says in the
postcards which he sends us as a pastime from the base hospital
where he is vegetating.
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