tramping of feet, the jingling of bayonets in their scabbards, of
cans and drinking-cups, the rumbling and hammering of the sixty
vehicles of the two convoys--fighting and regimental--that follow
the two battalions. And such a thing is it that trudges and spreads
itself over the climbing road that, in spite of the unbounded dome
of night, one welters in the odor of a den of lions.

In the ranks one sees nothing. Sometimes, when one can lift his nose
up, by grace of an eddy in the tide, one cannot help seeing the
whiteness of a mess-tin, the blue steel of a helmet, the black steel
of a rifle. Anon, by the dazzling jet of sparks that flies from a
pocket flint-and-steel, or the red flame that expands upon the
lilliputian stem of a match, one can see beyond the vivid near
relief of hands and faces to the silhouetted and disordered groups
of helmeted shoulders, swaying like surges that would storm the
sable stronghold of the night. Then, all goes out, and while each
tramping soldier's legs swing to and fro, his eye is fixed
inflexibly upon the conjectural situation of the back that dwells in
front of him.

After several halts, when we have allowed ourselves to collapse on
our haversacks at the foot of the stacked rifles--stacks that form
on the call of the whistle with feverish haste and exasperating
delay, through our blindness in that atmosphere of ink-dawn reveals
itself, extends, and acquires the domain of Space. The walls of the
Shadow crumble in vague ruin. Once more we pass under the grand
panorama of the day's unfolding upon the ever-wandering horde that
we are.

We emerge at last from this night of marching, across concentric