I abode there forty-five days. Towards the middle of September, we were allowed to go out after the evening meal and Sundays as well. We used to go in the evening to the Town Hall to read the despatches posted there; they were as uniform and monotonous as rain. Then a friend and I would go to the café, keeping step, our arms similarly swinging, exchanging some words, idle, and vaguely divided into two men. Or we went into it in a body, which isolated me. The saloon of the café enclosed the same odors as Fontan's; and while I stayed there, sunk in the soft seat, my boots grating on the tiled floor, my eye on the white marble, it was like a strip of a long dream of the past, a scanty memory that clothed me. There I used to write to Marie, and there I read again the letters I received from her, in which she said, "Nothing has changed since you were away." One Sunday, when I was beached on a seat in the square and weeping with yawns under the empty sky, I saw a young woman go by. By reason of some resemblance in outline, I thought of a woman who had loved me. I recalled the period when life was life, and that beautiful caressing body of once-on-a-time. It seemed to me that I held her in my arms, so close that I felt her breath, like velvet, on my face. We got a glimpse of the captain at one review. Once there was talk of a new draft for the front, but it was a false rumor. Then we said, "There'll never be any war for us," and that was a relief. My name flashed to my eyes in a departure list posted on the wall. My name was read out at morning parade, and it seemed to me that it was the only one they read. I had no time to get ready. In the evening of the next day our detachment passed out of the barracks by the little gate. CHAPTER XI AT THE WORLD'S END "We're going to Alsace," said the well-informed. "To the Somme," said the better-informed, louder. We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged and paralyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies. At long intervals the train would begin to move on again. It has left an impression with me that it was chiefly motionless. We got out, one afternoon, under a sky crowded with masses of darkness, in a station recently bombarded and smashed, and its roof left like a fish-bone. It overlooked a half-destroyed town, where, amid a foul whiteness of ruin, a few families were making shift to live in the rain. "'Pears we're in the Aisne country," they said. A downpour was in progress. Shivering, we busied ourselves with unloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and then ate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavy parallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see. Each looked after himself, with hardly a thought for the next man. On each side of the road were deserts without limits, flat and flabby, with trees like posts, and rusty fields patched with green mud.