my eyes. I saw a glowing road receding into space,
lined with palatial mansions and brilliant lights. . . .
Strange scarlet flowers swayed their corollae in the air
on the top of flexible stems, and a crowd of gay people
were singing at tables laden with refreshments and
delicious fruit. . . . Women with fluttering gauze skirts
were dancing on illumined lawns, to the music of numerous orchestras hidden in the grove strewn with
falling leaves, adorned with jasmines, sprinkled with
water.
"Halt!" commanded the sergeant.
I stopped, and in order not to sink down to the ground I had to hold on to the arm of a comrade. I awoke from my trance. . . . Darkness was all around me. We had come to the entrance of a forest, near a small town where the general and most of the officers went to find quarters. Having pitched my tent, I occupied myself with rubbing my feet, the skin of which was peeling off, with a candle which I had hidden in my knapsack, and like an emaciated dog, stretched myself out on the wet ground and immediately fell asleep. During the night, fellow-soldiers who, exhausted with fatigue, had dropped out of the ranks on the road, kept on coming into camp. Of these, five men were never heard from. It was ever so at each difficult march. Some of the men, weak or sick, fell into the ditches and died there; others deserted. . . .
The next morning reveille was sounded at dawn. The night had been extremely cold, it never stopped raining and we could not get any straw litter or hay to sleep on. It was very difficult for me to get out of the tent; for a while I was obliged to crawl on my knees on all fours, my legs refusing to carry me. My limbs were frozen stiff like bars of iron, I could not move my head on my paralyzed neck, and my eyes which felt as if they had been pricked by numerous
