It was night and, on the Steenstraete side, there was a house in flames, throwing huge red lights on the sky. The fuses, with their ideal colouring, rose silently again in the air with their gentle curves. Our long serpents, with their golden spangles, rushed out into the darkness, letting a star of pale light fall in the air. By gliding along, from shell hole to shell hole, it was possible to get as far as the mill. In the communication trench, a dark, crushed, charred body had sunk down. Farther on, there were paving stones that had been torn up and rubbish, from all sides, that had accumulated. The hillock was torn open and the opening led out to the light night. The shadows here were motionless and the very things looked dead. It was absolute solitude, a terrible picture of war, the strange domain of fear. * * * * * Of the five shelters, only one was intact. Two of them were nothing but heaps of planks. The ear was now accustomed to all the noises; it had learnt to know when danger was near and every sound had its own special significance in our minds. Every afternoon the action began again, it was always the same thing. Weariness made our heads and limbs seem heavy. Life was passing by in this way now. From time to time, delegates went to the different companies, bending down almost double, tricking danger. In the shelters, a fool was telling extraordinary tales, tales of riotous life and of quarrels. Everyone laughed. His face was all awry, but he would not upon any account laugh himself. There was a red-haired young man there, too, with long hair. He was pale and sickly. He was listening anxiously to all the sounds outside. Why in the world did he think so much of his life. He began arguing when it was his turn to start and then rushed out into the danger, as though his fate were a thing of great importance. We are all of us like that. Some of the men were asleep, others were eating, and a fierce-looking Grenadier was polishing the head of a shell. As a matter of fact, we could really have lived there a long time, it was only a question of habit and custom. To our right, the big green shells kept bursting fairly regularly on a group of houses. Farther on, shell-mines kept falling. No one paid any attention to these now. They came at their own sweet will on our side. Suddenly, a long, dark mass was to be seen rushing along and turning round and round above a roof. Was it a man that had been flung into the air? No, it was a shell that had not exploded and which had bounded again on to the footpath. The darkness came over us for the third time. It slowly changed the luminous tints of the sky into pastel-like grey harmonies, which grew slowly fainter and ended in darkness.