These maneuvers tired us to death, and especially the sham attacks on wooded mounds, carried out in the evening among bogs and thorn-thickets.

When we got back, most of the men fell heavily asleep just as they had fallen, beside their knapsacks, without having the heart to eat.
Right in the middle of the night and this paralyzed slumber, a cry echoed through the walls, "Alarm! Stand to arms!" We were so weary that the brutal reveille seemed at first, to the blinking and rusted men, like the shock of a nightmare.

Then, while the cold blew in through the open door and we heard the sentries running through the streets, while the corporals lighted the candles and shook us with their voices, we sat up askew, and crouched, and got our things ready, and stood up and fell in shivering, with flabby legs and minds befogged, in the black-hued street.
After the roll-call and some orders and counter-orders, we heard the command "Forward!" and we left the rest-camp as exhausted as when we entered it.

And thus we set out, no one knew where.
At first it was the same exodus as always.

It was on the same road that we disappeared: into the same great circles of blackness that we sank.
We came to the shattered glass works and then to the quarry, which daybreak was washing and fouling and making its desolation more complete.