the silent procession before us--looming out of the mist, passing
us, and fading into the mist, kept constantly moving. In the
ghostly light of the misty moonshine, the procession seemed to be
spectral--like a line of passing souls. A doctor came out of the
dugout and started up the hill. He, too, was swallowed in the mist.
Ahead of us up the road were noises that told us the Germans were
landing bombs there, not half a mile--perhaps not much more than
a quarter of a mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that the
Germans were shelling a cross-road. They shelled it every night at
midnight to smash the revitalment train. The shells were landing
right in the road whereon all these trucks and horse carts were
passing. The doctor who left us returned in a few minutes in an
ambulance--wounded. Another ambulance came up with four or five
wounded. A shell had crashed in and wiped out a truck load of men.
But the procession under the misty moon never stopped--never even
hesitated. No driver spoke. No teams or trucks cluttered up the
road. As fast as a bomb shattered the road out there behind the
mist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers hurried up, cleared
the way, removed the debris and the ceaseless procession in the
ghostly moonlight moved on. Another ambulance brought in two more
wounded.

After one o'clock the bombing stopped. Some other cross-road was
taking its turn. Five men were buried that night in the little
cemetery there by the dugout. We stood or sat about for a while!
no one had much to say. The grey mist thickened and enveloped us.
And we became as very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in the mist
up the hill, near where the rocket's red glare flushed on the dim
horizon, a man began whistling the intermezzo from "Thais." It
fitted the unreality of the scene, and soon two of us were whistling