We lived there some strenuous hours, some terrible weeks. Some suffered from trench foot, some froze to death, some were killed. These are terrible things: these nights on guard, these nights hugging the ground when on patrol, these nights in the listening-post when the body chills, becomes numb, and loses all sensation. One goes on detail and loses one’s way. One falls, dumb with fatigue, and an alarm sounds. One starts to sleep and an attack rages. War is a thing of horror. It is more. The very soil is hollowed out like dens of beasts; and into these creep human beings. The rain saturates the trench and rots legs and wood alike. The corpse hangs on the wire and serves as a target. War is cold, war is black, war is night. It is, in truth, such a horror that those who have lived these hours may say: “I was there. But to tell about it is to live it over again. And that is too much.” [Illustration: Emmanuel Bourcier at the front in the sector of Rheims in 1915.] As for us, we suffered. At first we had no dugouts and slept beneath the open sky. We had no trenches and stalked our foe while waist-deep in mud. In December’s cold we had no fire. This which we saw, which we defended, which the foe destroyed, was France. Our land was invaded, profaned by the German, and we could not retake it. These conquered forests, these occupied cities, these subjugated plains, these mountains polluted, were our native soil and we could not regain them. The sacred homeland was under the boot of the German. Was this the death-rattle in the throat of the republic? VI THE GAS The severe winter ran its course. We had worked incessantly. We had a whole sector to ourselves. First, there was the tangled network of barbed-wire, a piece of work in which we all had a share. Each evening, as night fell, a company of men went out on No Man’s Land to work in the thick, treacherous darkness. One gang dug holes and put in the posts, another stretched the parallel wires, another attached the transverse wires. As this required great blows of a mallet, it made considerable noise, which drew down the enemy’s gun-fire. As they gained experience, the men went out rapidly, worked swiftly, and returned to our trenches only when their task was accomplished. At dawn, the Boches tried to destroy our work of the night before, by firing many volleys into the network. The damage was never considerable, and they stopped that game when, imitating them, we cut their barbed-wire to pieces. Under that efficacious protection we contrived openings for listening and firing trenches. At the first, two men alternated in a constant lookout, with ear quick to catch any sound, with eyes strained to observe the most minute sign. Behind them, on the benches,[D] entire sections, with guns poised in the loopholes, waited and watched from twilight to dawn, while the others slept, down in the shelters underground.