We are submerged in a mysterious smoke, and at first I can only see blue uniforms in the stifling gulf. We go one way and then another, driven by each other, snarling and searching. We turn about, and with our hands encumbered by knife, bombs, and rifle, we do not know at first what to do.
"They're in their funk-holes, the swine!" is the cry. Heavy explosions are shaking the earth—underground, in the dug-outs. We are all at once divided by huge clouds of smoke so thick that we are masked and can see nothing more. We struggle like drowning men through the acrid darkness of a fallen fragment of night. One stumbles against barriers of cowering clustered beings who bleed and howl in the bottom. Hardly can one make out the trench walls, straight up just here and made of white sandbags, which are everywhere torn like paper. At one time the heavy adhesive reek sways and lifts, and one sees again the swarming mob of the attackers. Torn out of the dusty picture, the silhouette of a hand-to-hand struggle is drawn in fog on the wall, it droops and sinks to the bottom. I hear several shrill cries of "Kamarad!" proceeding from a pale-faced and gray-clad group in the huge corner made by a rending shell. Under the inky cloud the tempest of men flows back, climbs towards the right, eddying, pitching and falling, along the dark and ruined mole.
And suddenly one feels that it is over. We see and hear and understand that our wave, rolling here through the barrage fire, has not encountered an equal breaker. They have fallen back on our approach. The battle has dissolved in front of us. The slender curtain of defenders has crumbled into the holes, where they are caught like rats or killed. There is no more resistance, but a void, a great void. We advance in crowds like a terrible array of spectators.
And here the trench seems all lightning-struck. With its tumbled white walls it might be just here the soft and slimy bed of a vanished river that has left stony bluffs, with here and there the flat round hole of a pool, also dried up; and on the edges, on the sloping banks and in the bottom, there is a long trailing glacier of corpses—a dead river that is filled again to overflowing by the new tide and the breaking wave of our company. In the smoke vomited by dug-outs and the shaking wind of subterranean explosions, I come upon a compact mass of men hooked onto each other who are describing a wide circle. Just as we reach them the entire mass breaks up to make a residue of furious battle. I see Blaire break away, his helmet hanging on his neck by the chin-strap and his face flayed, and uttering a savage yell. I stumble upon a man who is crouching at the entry to a dug-out. Drawing back from the black hatchway, yawning and treacherous, he steadies himself with his left hand on a beam. In his right hand and for several seconds he holds a bomb which is on the point of exploding. It disappears in the hole, bursts immediately, and a horrible human echo answers him from the bowels of the earth. The man seizes another bomb.
Another man strikes and shatters the posts at the mouth of another dug-out with a pickax he has found there, causing a landslide, and the entry is blocked. I see several shadows trampling and gesticulating over the tomb.
Of the living ragged band that has got so far and has reached this long-sought trench after dashing against the storm of invincible shells and bullets launched to meet them, I can hardly recognize those whom I know, just as though all that had gone before of our lives had suddenly become very distant. There is some change working in them. A frenzied excitement is driving them all out of themselves.
"What are we stopping here for?" says one, grinding his teeth.
"Why don't we go on to the next?" a second asks me in fury. "Now we're here, we'd be there in a few jumps!'