"Masses of infantry; an endless hail of shell; not a gun to support us … don't let's talk about it, old man."
After the iciness of the preceding night, a day of burning sunshine. I am wearing ridiculously thin boots, which decrease in size as my feet swell. I give stones a wide berth.
To the right of the road the fields roll away like a great cloth, fresh and green until they reach the heights covered with trees, whose luxuriant foliage seems to fall from the top to the bottom of the slopes.
"Single file through the cutting."
That is the sign that we are entering the zone of fire of the German guns. We climb and pass through the village of Mouilly, built on the side of a slope. Almost all the houses, with their plaster façades, are on one side of the road, the left. On the other side meadows stretch away to where the sun rises and where the green of the wooded highlands begins its cascade to the plains below. Enormous shell-holes mark the meadows, about which the upflung earth forms brown circles which look from the distance like enormous stains.
Woods. Some shrapnel bursts ahead of us, but far away. In the cutting we encounter a big grey motor-car, ornamented with gilt letters. One of its wheels has been blown away and its steel sides bear the mark of shells: it was the product of some great Leipzig firm.
We overtake a regiment of the division at the end of the wood on the Mouilly-Saint-Rémy road. A fight has taken place, and our 75's are still sending down a rain of shells, forming a barrage some five hundred yards before us. We stand and watch it, Porchon and I, together with the two officers we are going to relieve. They are both fine soldiers and speak unaffectedly of the battle they have just passed through. One of them, tall, bony, with tanned skin and black eyes almost feverishly keen above a fine nose, expresses himself shortly and precisely. The second, small, rather too affable, with a wrinkled face, laughing eyes, fresh lips and a brown beard, entertains us with a recital of horrors in a cheerful voice and warns us that we are very likely to "leave our skins over there."
The thunder of the 75's almost splits our ears. Occasionally a German shell flies past us with a shrill whistle and peppers the trees with a volley of shrapnel. Into the midst of this tumult we march and take up position. My section occupies about fifty yards of a trench already full of corpses.
"Out with your tools," I say to my men, "and dig for all you are worth."
Night falls. The cold increases. It is that hour when, the battle ended, the wounded who have not yet been brought in, cry aloud in their suffering and distress. And those calls, those appealings, those moanings, awaken anguish in all those compelled to listen to them; an anguish the crueller for the fighters who are chained to their posts by stern duty yet who long to rush out to their gasping comrades, to dress their wounds, to speak words of comfort to them, and to carry them to safety where fires burn brightly and warm. Yet we must not do so; we are chained to the spot, our hearts wrung, our nerves quivering, shivering at the sound of soul-stricken cries brought to us unceasingly by the night.