scorched, broken like faggots, thrown all ways, pierced by
bullets--look, this pock-marked pestilence, here! Ah, my boy, my
boy, you can't imagine how it is disfigured, this road!" And he goes
forward, seeing some new amazement at every step.

It is a fantastic road enough, in truth. On both sides of it are
crouching armies, and their missiles have mingled on it for a year
and a half. It is a great disheveled highway, traveled only by
bullets and by ranks and files of shells, that have furrowed and
upheaved it, covered it with the earth of the fields, scooped it and
laid bare its bones. It might be under a curse; it is a way of no
color, burned and old, sinister and awful to see.

"If you'd only known it--how clean and smooth it was!" says
Poterloo. "All sorts of trees were there, and leaves, and
colors--like butterflies; and there was always some one passing on
it to give good-day to some good woman rocking between two baskets,
or people shouting [note 1] to each other in a chaise, with the good
wind ballooning their smocks. Ah, how happy life was once on a
time!"

He dives down to the banks of the misty stream that follows the
roadway towards the land of parapets. Stooping, he stops by some
faint swellings of the ground on which crosses are fixed--tombs,
recessed at intervals into the wall of fog, like the Stations of the
Cross in a church.

I call him--we shall never get there at such a funeral pace. Allons!

We come to a wide depression in the land, I in front and Poterloo