He ran across the street and through the gateway. Once outside, he edged
into line and shouldered his way along the road. A corporal passed, looked
at him, repassed, and finally called an officer. "You belong to the 60th,"
growled the corporal looking at the number on his képi. "We have no use for Franc-tireurs," added the officer, catching sight of
his black trousers. "I wish to volunteer in place of a comrade," said Trent, and the officer
shrugged his shoulders and passed on. Nobody paid much attention to him, one or two merely glancing at his
trousers. The road was deep with slush and mud-ploughed and torn by wheels
and hoofs. A soldier in front of him wrenched his foot in an icy rut and
dragged himself to the edge of the embankment groaning. The plain on
either side of them was grey with melting snow. Here and there behind
dismantled hedge-rows stood wagons, bearing white flags with red crosses. Sometimes the driver was a priest in rusty hat and gown, sometimes a
crippled Mobile. Once they passed a wagon driven by a Sister of Charity. Silent empty houses with great rents in their walls, and every window
blank, huddled along the road. Further on, within the zone of danger,
nothing of human habitation remained except here and there a pile of
frozen bricks or a blackened cellar choked with snow. For some time Trent had been annoyed by the man behind him, who kept
treading on his heels. Convinced at last that it was intentional, he
turned to remonstrate and found himself face to face with a fellow-student
from the Beaux Arts. Trent stared. "I thought you were in the hospital!" The other shook his head, pointing to his bandaged jaw. "I see, you can't speak. Can I do anything?" The wounded man rummaged in his haversack and produced a crust of black
bread. "He can't eat it, his jaw is smashed, and he wants you to chew it for
him," said the soldier next to him. Trent took the crust, and grinding it in his teeth morsel by morsel,
passed it back to the starving man. From time to time mounted orderlies sped to the front, covering them with
slush. It was a chilly, silent march through sodden meadows wreathed in
fog. Along the railroad embankment across the ditch, another column moved
parallel to their own. Trent watched it, a sombre mass, now distinct, now
vague, now blotted out in a puff of fog. Once for half-an-hour he lost it,
but when again it came into view, he noticed a thin line detach itself
from the flank, and, bellying in the middle, swing rapidly to the west. At
the same moment a prolonged crackling broke out in the fog in front. Other
lines began to slough off from the column, swinging east and west, and the
crackling became continuous. A battery passed at full gallop, and he drew
back with his comrades to give it way. It went into action a little to the
right of his battalion, and as the shot from the first rifled piece boomed
through the mist, the cannon from the fortifications opened with a mighty
roar. An officer galloped by shouting something which Trent did not catch,
but he saw the ranks in front suddenly part company with his own, and
disappear in the twilight. More officers rode up and stood beside him
peering into the fog. Away in front the crackling had become one prolonged
crash. It was dreary waiting. Trent chewed some bread for the man behind,
who tried to swallow it, and after a while shook his head, motioning Trent
to eat the rest himself. A corporal offered him a little brandy and he
drank it, but when he turned around to return the flask, the corporal was
lying on the ground. Alarmed, he looked at the soldier next to him, who
shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth to speak, but something struck
him and he rolled over and over into the ditch below. At that moment the
horse of one of the officers gave a bound and backed into the battalion,
lashing out with his heels. One man was ridden down; another was kicked in
the chest and hurled through the ranks. The officer sank his spurs into
the horse and forced him to the front again, where he stood trembling. The
cannonade seemed to draw nearer. A staff-officer, riding slowly up and
down the battalion suddenly collapsed in his saddle and clung to his
horse's mane. One of his boots dangled, crimsoned and dripping, from the
stirrup. Then out of the mist in front men came running. The roads, the
fields, the ditches were full of them, and many of them fell. For an
instant he imagined he saw horsemen riding about like ghosts in the
vapours beyond, and a man behind him cursed horribly, declaring he too had
seen them, and that they were Uhlans; but the battalion stood inactive,
and the mist fell again over the meadows. The colonel sat heavily upon his horse, his bullet-shaped head buried in
the astrakan collar of his dolman, his fat legs sticking straight out in
the stirrups. The buglers clustered about him with bugles poised, and behind him a
staff-officer in a pale blue jacket smoked a cigarette and chatted with a
captain of hussars. From the road in front came the sound of furious
galloping and an orderly reined up beside the colonel, who motioned him to
the rear without turning his head. Then on the left a confused murmur
arose which ended in a shout. A hussar passed like the wind, followed by
another and another, and then squadron after squadron whirled by them into
the sheeted mists. At that instant the colonel reared in his saddle, the
bugles clanged, and the whole battalion scrambled down the embankment,
over the ditch and started across the soggy meadow. Almost at once Trent
lost his cap. Something snatched it from his head, he thought it was a
tree branch. A good many of his comrades rolled over in the slush and ice,
and he imagined that they had slipped. One pitched right across his path
and he stopped to help him up, but the man screamed when he touched him
and an officer shouted, "Forward! Forward!" so he ran on again. It was a
long jog through the mist, and he was often obliged to shift his rifle. When at last they lay panting behind the railroad embankment, he looked
about him. He had felt the need of action, of a desperate physical
struggle, of killing and crushing. He had been seized with a desire to
fling himself among masses and tear right and left. He longed to fire, to
use the thin sharp bayonet on his chassepot. He had not expected this. He
wished to become exhausted, to struggle and cut until incapable of lifting
his arm. Then he had intended to go home. He heard a man say that half the
battalion had gone down in the charge, and he saw another examining a
corpse under the embankment. The body, still warm, was clothed in a
strange uniform, but even when he noticed the spiked helmet lying a few
inches further away, he did not realize what had happened. The colonel sat on his horse a few feet to the left, his eyes sparkling
under the crimson képi. Trent heard him reply to an officer: "I can hold
it, but another charge, and I won't have enough men left to sound a
bugle."