AT THE WORLD'S END "We're going to Alsace," said the well-informed.

"To the Somme," said the better-informed, louder.
We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged and paralyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies.
At long intervals the train would begin to move on again.

It has left an impression with me that it was chiefly motionless.
We got out, one afternoon, under a sky crowded with masses of darkness, in a station recently bombarded and smashed, and its roof left like a fish-bone.

It overlooked a half-destroyed town, where, amid a foul whiteness of ruin, a few families were making shift to live in the rain.
"'Pears we're in the Aisne country," they said.
A downpour was in progress.

Shivering, we busied ourselves with unloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and then ate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavy parallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see.