It's been like this for two months, old man, and we'll be able to say we've been through the war without a chilblain, we shall." At dawn I resumed my lookout at the loophole.

Quite near, on the slope of the little wood, the bushes and the bare branches are broidered with drops of water.

In front, under the fatal space where the eternal passage of projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, the field resembles a field, the road resembles a road.

Ultimately one makes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpse in a field--a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades of grass disguise! At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and it resembled the past.
Thus went the days by, the weeks and the months; four days in the front line, the harassing journey to and from it, the monotonous sentry-go, the spy-hole on the plain, the mesmerism of the empty outlook and of the deserts of waiting; and after that, four days of rest-camp full of marches and parades and great cleansings of implements and of streets, with regulations of the strictest, anticipating all the different occasions for punishment, a thousand fatigues, each with as many harsh knocks, the litany of optimist phrases, abstruse and utopian, in the orders of the day, and a captain who chiefly concerned himself with the two hundred cartridges and the reserve rations.

The regiment had no losses, or almost none; a few wounds during reliefs, and sometimes one or two deaths which were announced like accidents.