We all have nothing in common but eyes of evening and a soul of night.
And always, always, in these trenches whose walls run down like waves, with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers go forward endlessly, towing each other.

They go as quickly as they can, as if the walls were going to close upon them.

They are bowed as if they were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which they carry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they might rocks in hell.

From minute to minute we are filling the places of the obliterated hosts who have passed this way like the wind or have stayed here like the earth.
We halt in a funnel.

We lean our backs against the walls, resting the packs on the projections which bristle from them.