In some sections of trench one could sometimes even descry black lines, like a dark wall between other walls, and these lines stirred--they were the workmen of destruction.
A whole region in the north, on higher ground, was a forest flown away, leaving only a stranded bristling of masts, like a quayside.

There was thunder in the sky, but it was drizzling, too, and even the flashes were gray above that infinite liquefaction in which each regiment was as lost as each man.
We entered the plain and disappeared into the trench.

The "open crossing" was now pierced by a trench, though it was little more than begun.

Amid the smacks of the bullets which blurred its edges we had to crawl flat on our bellies, along the sticky bottom of this gully.
The close banks gripped and stopped our packs so that we floundered perforce like swimmers, to go forward in the earth, under the murder in the air.

For a second the anguish and the effort stopped my heart and in a nightmare I saw the cadaverous littleness of my grave closing over me.
At the end of this torture we got up again, in spite of the knapsacks.
The last star-shells were sending a bloody _aurora borealis_ into the morning.