Under Fire: The Story of a Squad

"And now, what is it? Look at it--a sort of long thing without a soul--sad, sad. Look at these two trenches on each side, alive; this ripped-up paving, bored with funnels; these...

Little by little, peace, silence, and darkness take possession of the barn and enshroud the hopes and the sighs of its occupants. The lines of identical bundles formed by these...

Sit down? Impossible; it is too dirty inside there. The ground and the paving-stones are plastered with mud; the straw scattered for our sleeping is soaked through, by the water...

I led Poterloo away: "You exaggerate, old chap; you're getting absurd notions, come." We had walked very slowly and were still at the foot of the hill. The fog was becoming like...

On our left, detachments of cavalry and infantry move ever forward like a ponderous flood. We hear the diffused obscurity of voices. We see some ranks delineated by a flash of p...

Barque sighs and is silent, and the end of his discourse gives a chance of hearing to a bit of jingling narrative, told in an undertone: "He was coming along with two horses--Fs...

It was four nights ago that they were all killed together. I remember the night myself indistinctly--it is like a dream. We were on patrol--they, I, Mesnil Andre, and Corporal B...

Driven as if by the wind, we mount or descend at the will of the hollows and the earthy mounds in the gigantic fissure dug and blackened and burned by furious flames. The soil c...

He means--and I am with him in his meaning--"More than attacks that are like ceremonial reviews, more than visible battles unfurled like banners, more even than the hand-to-hand...

We know the pious claptrap. It is not recorded in the annals of the regiment that a trenching fatigue-party ever once got away before the moment when it became absolutely necess...

Through the glass of the low window we see lifted the face of an old man--like a fish in a bowl, it looks--a face curiously flat, and lined with parallel wrinkles, like a page o...

I am deputed to accompany Mesnil Joseph to the refuge on the Pylones road. Sergeant Henriot gives me charge of the wounded man and hands me his clearing order. "If you meet Bert...

"Ah! And then, too," he added, emptying--as politeness requires--the drop of wine that remained at the bottom of Farfadet's cup, "we got two Boches. They were crawling about out...

There is indeed a surprising collection of papers among the things disgorged by Volpatte's pockets--the violet packet of writing-paper, whose unworthy printed envelope is out at...

"Isn't he lucky, that game-bird; it's imposs', I've got stumped three times I want nothing more to do with you. You're skinning me this evening, and you robbed me the other day,...

FROM this point onwards we are in sight of the enemy observation-posts, and must no longer leave the communication trenches. First we follow that of the Pylones road. The trench...

The four alarming objects get under way, cloud-shape, in the trench that unwinds itself sinuously before them like a blind alley, unsafe, unlighted, and unpaved. It is uninhabit...

Women and children are waiting for them, in pretty and happy clusters. The commercial people are shutting up their shops with complacent content and a smile for both the day end...

The huge Red Cross sergeant, in a hunter's chestnut waistcoat which gives him the chest of a gorilla, is detaching the pendent entrails twisted among the beams of the shattered...

In this time of letter-writing, the men reveal the most and the best that they ever were. Several others surrender to the past, and its first expression is to talk once more of...

"Look, here they are! The ham here, and the bread, and there's the booze. Well, seeing it's there, you don't know what we're going to do with it? We're going to share it out bet...

"Yes, the padded luneys. But during dinner these gentlemen talked above all about themselves. Every one, so as to explain why he wasn't somewhere else, as good as said (but all...

"Old man, he was there, his buttocks in a hole, doubled up, gaping at the sky with his legs in the air, and his pumps offered themselves to me with an air that meant they were w...

She looks at him and stops, framed by the hawthorn. Her strangely slight and pale face is apprehensive, the lids tremble on her magnificent eyes. She is bareheaded, and in the h...

I. The Vision II. In the Earth III. The Return IV. Volpatte and Fouillade V. Sanctuary VI. Habits VII. Entraining VIII. On Leave IX. The Anger of Volpatte X. Argoval XI. The Dog...

There is a hissing noise. Paradis sharply bows his head and we follow suit. "The fuse!--it has gone over." The shrapnel fuse goes up and then comes down vertically; but that of...

Already there is uneasy hesitation in these castaways' discussion of their tragedy, in the huge masterpiece of destiny that they are roughly sketching. It is not only the peril...