With this malignantly heavy thing, animated with barbarous and powerful movement, I cross the ruins of a railway station, all stones and beams.
We clamber up an embankment which slips away and avoids us, we drag and push the rebellious and implacable burden.

It cannot be reached, that receding height.

But we reach it, all the same.
Ah, I am a normal man! I cling to life, and I have the consciousness of duty.

But at that moment I called from the bottom of my heart for the bullet which would have delivered me from life.
We return, with empty hands, in a sort of sinister comfort.

I remember, as we came in, a neighbor said to me--or to some one else: "Sheets of corrugated iron are worse." The fatigues have to be stopped at dawn, although the engineers protest against the masses of stores which uselessly fill the depot.
We sleep from six to seven in the morning.