Hours and hours passed by. The evening fell. There were no halts, or almost none. The night came down. We went on mechanically, hour after hour, bowed beneath our packs. No one stayed behind. Guillaumin had spread the report that the Uhlans, pushing on behind us, butchered all the stragglers—a superfluous intimidation. After three weeks of active service, those who had already fallen out eliminated, these classes of reserves contained nothing but unusually good soldiers ... no more sentiment or thought ... admirable beasts of burden. Shall I say that we slept standing up? But I mean it quite literally. Many of them I swear were snoring. Every other minute one got one's neighbour's rifle in the shoulder or in the face: not that it woke one up for very long. It was astonishing that there were no serious accidents. Had we crossed the Meuse? Were we continuing to skirt it? Guillaumin was talking in his sleep. At one point he said to me:
"We're going through Verdun, you see?"
I raised my heavy eyes and said:
"Are you sure?"
He made a movement with his head:
"Look at these two-storied houses."
They were the trees bordering the road. I had not even the strength to smile. At dawn an artillery officer galloped along the column. He slowed down on a level with us and asked:
"Have you seen him? My orderly! He must have fallen off his horse on to the road."
The men nudged and questioned each other. Nobody, no. Nobody had seen anything. We learnt, ten minutes later, that the man had just been picked up gasping and on the point of death, a kilometre behind us. The whole regiment had gone over his body without noticing it.