I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spite of the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive at the end of the fifty minutes' march.

But I did all the same, because I had no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, and because I could thus always _do one step more_.

I knew later that this is nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldiers completing superhuman physical efforts to the very end.
The cold blast benumbed us, while we dragged ourselves through the softened plains which evening was darkening.

At one halt I saw one of those men who used to agitate at the depot to be sent to the front.

He had sunk down at the foot of the stacked rifles; exertion had made him almost unrecognizable, and he told me that he had had enough of war! And little Melusson, whom I once used to see at Viviers, lifted to me his yellowish face, sweat-soaked, where the folds of the eyelids seemed drawn with red crayon, and informed me that he should report sick the next day.
After four marches of despairing length under a lightless sky over a colorless earth, we stood for two hours, hot and damp, at the chilly top of a hill, where a village was beginning.