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absorb impressions, came to the surface at night and intensified perceptions which, after all, had been deprived of only one of their number—and that one only partially in Didier’s case—sight.
    His sense of direction was a strong one; so strong, indeed, that it inclined him to be intolerant of those who did not have it and to be contemptuous of their laziness, to which he attributed their deficiency. Didier knew exactly where he was; it was a question of pride for him to know this. He knew the regiment had left the village shortly after nightfall on the same road by which it had entered. He knew he had walked up a hill. He had felt the open fields of the low plateau, and the road curving back through them. He had not been able to discern the outline of the wood into which he had been plunged abruptly, but he knew he was in a wood because he had felt space and sound confined about him. His sixth sense of the out-of-doors told him that these places were the same places he had passed through that morning. The order to break step, which was relayed back down the column as it approached the bridge over the stream, merely confirmed his certainty of his position, and the slight tonal change in the echo of the marching regiment, shortly thereafter, made him aware that he was now walking between walls of brick instead of walls of trees—the walls of the hamlet.
    Thus, when he heard the boots of the company ahead of him strike on the cobblestones, resound on them for a space, and then go soft again, he automatically noted the fact that the regiment was cutting straight across the highway, past the Café du Carrefour, and that it was heading towards another sector of that front which it had, in his opinion, only too recently quitted.
    â€œSo, that’s it,” he said to himself. “Combat order, and this direction. Something doing, all right. The moon ought to be up soon and then I can get some idea of the lay of the land.”
    The regiment tramped on in silence. Even the newly joined recruits had had some of their spirits taken out of them by the marching and counter-marching. The others were too weary and dazed by unfinished sleep even to swear. There comes a degree of numbness in fatigue and exasperation which can be expressed only by a sullen silence. Five hours’ sleep had been just enough to stiffen all those men’s muscles but not enough to begin the work of reviving them. Equipment, boots, clothing had stiffened too and, worst of all, their boots had all been made a size too small by the swelling of their feet which they had hastened to release from them....
    The tail of the regiment vanished on the other side of the highway, enlarging at each step the gap between itself and the Café du Carrefour.
    â€œTo the trenches, again,” said the old woman as the last hobnails of the column went silent on the continuation of the dirt road beyond the cobblestones—her cobblestones, as she was in the habit of thinking of them. She was sitting by her stove in the carefully shuttered café, sipping her bowl of black coffee. “To the trenches, again.” She did not add “Poor devils!” because no such commiserating thought came into her head. She merely made an oral note of a fact. She had sat there, like that, for the better part of two years, ticking off to herself the mysterious and aimless movements of the armies which fluctuated around her crossroads. At first she had sat at her door and watched them. Then winter had driven her inside, and she had stayed on there, alone and without curiosity. There was, moreover, no need for her to come out any more for, as she soon discovered, she had learnt the significance of sounds and her ears now gave her almost as much news of what went on around the crossroads as her eyes had formerly done. She could, for instance, make a fair estimate of the size of a body of troops by the duration and spacing of its tramp. She knew the