"The entrance to the village, which is indeed little more than a hamlet, was choked with carriages, with ploughs and horse-rakes, which had been drawn to one side. In silence we pass before the shattered houses. Nothing remains but the mere shells of walls and distorted chimneys still standing above the wrecked hearths. Some charred beams have rolled almost into the middle of the roadway; a large mechanical mowing-machine raises its broken shaft like a stump.
"The regiment defiles through the gloomy evening; our steps resound lugubriously and violate the surrounding desolation. In a short while, when the last section will have disappeared over the summit of the hill, the cold and silent night will descend again on the village, and peace shroud the poor, dead houses."
The regiment is on the march, and it is raining:
"Resignation indeed is difficult of attainment when one knows, as we do, the increase of our sufferings the rain involves: the heavy clothes; the coldness which penetrates with the water; the hardened leather of our boots; trousers flapping against the legs and hindering each stride; the linen at the bottom of the knapsack—that precious linen, to feel which against one's skin is a sheer delight—hopelessly stained, transformed little by little into a sodden mass on which papers and bottles of pickles have left their stain; the mud that spurts into one's face and covers one's hands; the confused arrival; the night all too short for sleep passed beneath a coat that freezes instead of warming; the whole body stiff, joints without suppleness, painful; and the departure with boots of wood which crush the feet like the torture-shoe. Hard, indeed, is resignation!"
But something turns up which makes the regiment forget the rain and its own sufferings. It passes between lines of strangely still bodies—and those are the bodies of Frenchmen, their brothers.
"They seem attired all in new clothes, those still figures, so continuously has the unceasing rain poured down upon them. Their flesh is decomposed. Seeing them so darkened, with lips so swollen, some of the men exclaimed:
"'Hullo! These are Turks!'"
Their bodies had been "sloped backwards," facing the road, as though "to watch us pass." The Germans, retreating after the days of the Marne, indulged freely in the folly of arranging the bodies of their victims after this fashion. The officer himself was for a moment overcome by this horrifying spectacle, but:
"Come! Head erect and fists clenched! No more of that weakness that a moment ago assailed me. We must look unmoved on these poor dead and seek from them the inspiration of hate. It was the Boche in his flight who dragged these sorry things to the side of the road, who arranged this horrid spectacle for our express benefit, and we must never rest until the brute has drunk our cup of vengeance to the dregs."
The regiment has come to War; night falls, a night towards the end of September: