And now the walls of flabby flagstones and the open-mouthed caves have begun again. Morning rises, long and narrow as our lot. We reach a busy trench-crossing. A stench catches my throat: some cess-pool into which these streets suspended in the earth empty their sewage? No, we see rows of stretchers, each one swollen. There is a tent there of gray canvas, which flaps like a flag, and on its fluttering wall the dawn lights up a bloody cross. * * * * * * Sometimes, when we are high enough for our eyes to unbury themselves, I can dimly see some geometrical lines, so confused, so desolated by distance, that I do not know if it is our country or the other; even when one sees he does not know. Our looks are worn away in looking. We do not see, we are powerless to people the world. We all have nothing in common but eyes of evening and a soul of night. And always, always, in these trenches whose walls run down like waves, with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers go forward endlessly, towing each other. They go as quickly as they can, as if the walls were going to close upon them. They are bowed as if they were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which they carry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they might rocks in hell. From minute to minute we are filling the places of the obliterated hosts who have passed this way like the wind or have stayed here like the earth. We halt in a funnel. We lean our backs against the walls, resting the packs on the projections which bristle from them. But we examine these things coming out of the earth, and we smell that they are knees, elbows and heads. They were interred there one day and the following days are disinterring them. At the spot where I am, from which I have roughly and heavily recoiled with all my armory, a foot comes out from a subterranean body and protrudes. I try to put it out of the way, but it is strongly incrusted. One would have to break the corpse of steel, to make it disappear. I look at the morsel of mortality. My thoughts, and I cannot help them, are attracted by the horizontal body that the world bruises; they go into the ground with it and mold a shape for it. Its face--what is the look which rots crushed in the dark depth of the earth at the top of these remains? Ah, one catches sight of what there is under the battlefields! Everywhere in the spacious wall there are limbs, and black and muddy gestures. It is a sepulchral sculptor's great sketch-model, a bas-relief in clay that stands haughtily before our eyes. It is the portal of the earth's interior; yes, it is the gate of hell. * * * * * *