"Unless all this is merely a feint, and to-night ..."
"Yes, you're right, unless to-night ..."
The column started, and, guided by the liaison orderly, we followed the high-road for some hundred yards. The shells had transformed it into a series of gorges, peaks, ravines, and hills. We had to jump over big branches cut from the trees by the projectiles. It was a road that would not be a cheerful one on moonless nights. Fortunately for us, that particular night was extremely bright. Everything around us could be distinguished; we could even divine about fifteen hundred yards to our right the "solitary tree," the famous tree, standing alone in the middle of the vast bare plain, which marked the centre of our sector of trenches, and where I knew I should find the "dug-out" belonging to the officers of our regiment. I was very much tempted to jump the ditch at the side of the road and cut across the fields to the final point of our march. It would have taken about twenty minutes, and have saved us the long difficult journey through the communication trench. But our orders were very precise: we were not to take short cuts even on dark nights, much less on starlit nights. Our chiefs do well to be cautious on our behalf, for it is certain that, though fully alive to the danger of such a route, there was not one of my hundred fellows who would have hesitated to dash across country just to save himself a few hundred yards.
We came to the mouth of the approach trench, four or five huge steps cut in the chalky clay. The frost had made them slippery, and we had to keep close to the edge of the bank to avoid stumbling. Behind me I heard some of the men sliding down heavily, and a din of mess-tins rolling away amidst laughter and jokes. "A merry heart goes all the way," and I knew my Chasseurs would soon pick themselves up and make up for lost time. This was essential, for the approach trench had ramifications and unexpected cross-passages which might have led a laggard astray.
We went forward slowly. The communication trench was at right angles to the enemy's trenches. To prevent him from enfilading it with his shells, it had been cut in zigzags. And I hardly know of a more laborious method of progression than that of taking ten paces to the right, making a sharp turn, and then again taking ten paces to the left, and so on, in order to cover a distance which, as the crow flies, would not be more than fifteen hundred yards. The passage was so narrow that we touched the walls on either side. The moonlight could not reach the ground we trod on, and we stumbled incessantly over the holes and inequalities caused by the late rains and hardened by the frost. Now and again we slid over ice that had formed on the little pools through which our comrades had been paddling two days before. And this was some consolation for the severity of the frost, preferable a hundred times to the horrors of the rain.
At last we debouched into our trenches, where our predecessors were impatiently waiting for us. Two days and two nights is a long time to go without sleeping, without washing, without having any other view than the walls of earth that shut you in. They were all eager to go back over the same road they had come by two days before, to get to their horses again, their quarters, their friends—in short, their home. So we found them quite ready to go, blankets rolled up and slung over their shoulders, and knapsacks in their places under their cloaks.
Whilst the non-commissioned officers of each squadron went to relieve the men at the listening posts, I brushed past the men lined up against the wall, and went towards the "solitary tree," which seemed to be stretching out its gaunt arms to protect our retreat. I had to turn to the right in a narrow passage which went round the tree, and ended in three steep steps cut in the earth, down which I had to go to reach the dug-out.
My old friend La G. was waiting for me at the bottom of this den, stretched on two chairs, warming his feet at a tiny iron stove perched upon a heap of bricks. By the light of the one candle he looked imposing and serious. His tawny beard, which he had allowed to grow since the war, spread like a fan over his chest, and gave him a look of Henri IV. I knew that this formidable exterior concealed the merriest companion and the most delightful sly joker that ever lived. So I was not much impressed by his thoughtful brow and his dreamy eye.
"Well, what's the news?" I asked.
"We are all freezing," he replied.