THE great pale sky is alive with thunderclaps. Each detonation
reveals together a shaft of red falling fire in what is left of the
night, and a column of smoke in what has dawned of the day. Up
there--so high and so far that they are heard unseen--a flight of
dreadful birds goes circling up with strong and palpitating cries to
look down upon the earth.

The earth! It is a vast and water-logged desert that begins to take
shape under the long-drawn desolation of daybreak. There are pools
and gullies where the bitter breath of earliest morning nips the
water and sets it a-shiver; tracks traced by the troops and the
convoys of the night in these barren fields, the lines of ruts that
glisten in the weak light like steel rails, mud-masses with broken
stakes protruding from them, ruined trestles, and bushes of wire in
tangled coils. With its slime-beds and puddles, the plain might be
an endless gray sheet that floats on the sea and has here and there
gone under. Though no rain is falling, all is drenched, oozing,
washed out and drowned, and even the wan light seems to flow.

Now you can make out a network of long ditches where the lave of the
night still lingers. It is the trench. It is carpeted at bottom with
a layer of slime that liberates the foot at each step with a sticky
sound; and by each dug-out it smells of the night's excretions. The
holes themselves, as you stoop to peer in, are foul of breath.

I see shadows coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge
and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are
"us." We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking
wrap us up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch