Then we had to set off again.
We had never passed that way but in the dark, and we did not recognize the scenes now that we saw them.

From the lane which we descended, holding ourselves back, to gain the trench, we saw for the first time the desert through which we had so often passed--plains and lagoons unlimited.
The waterlogged open country, with its dispirited pools and their smoke-like islets of trees, seemed nothing but a reflection of the leaden, cloud-besmirched sky.

The walls of the trenches, pallid as ice-floes, marked with their long, sinuous crawling where they had been slowly torn from the earth by the shovels.

These embossings and canals formed a complicated and incalculable network, smudged near at hand by bodies and wreckage; dreary and planetary in the distance.

One could make out the formal but hazy stakes and posts, aligned in the distance to the end of sight; and here and there the swellings and round ink-blots of the dugouts.