At the foot of a bill in the half-light, we reach some houses, still
slumbering and wrapped in heavy grayness

"There it is!"

Poof! We've done twenty-eight kilometers in the night. But what of
that? There is no halt. We go past the houses, and they sink back
again into their vague vapors and their mysterious shroud.

"Seems we've got to march a long time yet. It's always there, there,
there!"

We march like machines, our limbs invaded by a sort of petrified
torpor; our joints cry aloud, and force us to make echo.

Day comes slowly, for a blanket of mist covers the earth. It is so
cold that the men dare not sit down during the halts, though
overborne by weariness, and they pace to and fro in the damp
obscurity like ghosts. The besom of a biting wintry wind whips our
skin, sweeps away and scatters our words and our sighs.

At last the sun pierces the reek that spreads over us and soaks what
it touches, and something like a fairy glade opens out in the midst
of this gloom terrestrial. The regiment stretches itself and wakes
up in truth, with slow-lifted faces to the gilded silver of the
earliest rays. Quickly, then, the sun grows fiery, and now it is too
hot. In the ranks we pant and sweat, and our grumbling is louder
even than just now, when our teeth were chattering and the fog
wet-sponged our hands and faces.