"Good-night! Go and sleep! Go on!"
He departs, leaving me solitary and alone in the midst of fast sleeping men. To sleep like them!… To be able to stifle all thought, to forget! In my hand the little possessions of the dead men grow heavier and heavier…. "Gronin Charles, railway employee…." The smiling faces of the photograph dance beneath my closed eyelids, grow bigger and bigger until they become almost a hallucination. The poor, poor people!
Thursday, September 10th.
Something splashes gently on my face: raindrops large and tepid. Have I indeed been asleep, then? And what time can it be? The wind is rising, but the night is still black. A little to the right front of the trench a dark mass is outlined against the still darker sky. That must be the heaped-up bundles of straw in which the major, the captain and his messengers have ensconced themselves for the night.
I have just settled to sleep again when a few bullets whistle overhead. It seems to me that they come from close at hand. Yet we, being the advance posts, can have no other detachments before us. What does it mean then?
I am not permitted much time for speculation; abruptly, a concentrated fusillade breaks out, every second approaching nearer and nearer and extending the whole length of the line. Without doubt, those are Germans firing, directing a night attack against us.
"On your feet, every man of you. On your feet. Quick. Get up!"
I shake a corporal sleeping near me. From one end of the line to the other a shiver passes, followed by the quick rustling of straw; then bayonets clatter, and magazines click.
All this has passed in an instant, yet I have still had time to see the major and the captain jump back down into the trench away to the right, and scarcely have they done so before black figures are silhouetted, barely discernible against the lightless sky, over the top of the nearest rising. They were not thirty yards away when I distinguished the pointed spikes of their helmets. That sight was more than sufficient. At the top of my lungs I issue an order for rapid fire.
Hardly has the command left my lips when the dense masses of men rapidly approaching us burst into shrill, savage shouts.