“Rather the trenches where we can snooze in peace,” they say.
The column trails along. Pierron, the sergeant who leads it, pays no attention. With Millazo, a tradesman from Hanoï who has arrived just recently, he talks of Indo-China, of Saigon, and their gardens.
We had scarcely arrived at the end of the sunken road which opens out on an uncovered slope on top of a ridge than a well-known whistling shatters space. Each of us throws himself on the ground, in a ditch behind a tree, and the shell passes over us in the air.
“That wasn’t meant for us.”
Then another, still another, and dozens like it; we count up to sixty.
“M ... what are they having at Proyart for dessert?”
That is all the concern they have about what is going on in the rear, or about the havoc and death the bombardment is launching at this moment on the cantonment where their comrades live. That is the egotistical indifference which long experience with danger gives, and the constant contemplation of death. The column marches along more carefully and wider awake, concealing themselves from the view of the enemy’s aerial observers which are to be seen high on the horizon in spite of the late hour and the twilight which has already begun to grow dark.
“Do you suppose they’ve forgotten the sausage?”
“Sometimes they stay out to give us a shot.”