"Forward into the filth!" cries the leader of the troop.
We plunge in, tense with repulsion. Bullets are whistling over.
"Lower your heads!" The trench has little depth; one must stoop very
low to avoid being hit, and the stench becomes intolerable. At last
we emerge into the communication trench that we left in error. We
begin again to march. Though we march without end we arrive nowhere.
While we wander on, dumb and vacant, in the dizzy stupefaction of
fatigue, the stream which is running in the bottom of the trench
cleanses our befouled feet.
The roars of the artillery succeed each other faster and faster,
till they make but a single roar upon all the earth. From all sides
the gunfire and the bursting shells hurl their swift shafts of light
and stripe confusedly the black sky over our heads. The bombardment
then becomes so intense that its illumination has no break. In the
continuous chain of thunderbolts we can see each other clearly--our
helmets streaming like the bodies of fishes, our sodden leathers,
the shovel-blades black and glistening; we can even see the pale
drops of the unending rain. Never have I seen the like of it; in
very truth it is moonlight made by gunfire.
Together there mounts from our lines and from the enemy's such a
cloud of rockets that they unite and mingle in constellations; at
one moment, to light us on our hideous way, there was a Great Bear
of star-shells in the valley of the sky that we could see between
the parapets.
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