All Quiet on the Western Front / На Западном фронте без перемен. Книга для чтения на английском языке

The column marches, straight ahead, the figures become a wedge, and you can no longer make out individual men, just this dark wedge, pushing forwards, made even more strange by the heads and rifles bobbing along on the misty lake. A column – not men.

Light artillery and munition wagons move in from a side road. The backs of the horses shine in the moonlight and their movements are good to see – they toss their heads and their eyes flash. The guns and the wagons glide past against an indistinct background like a lunar landscape, while the steel-helmeted cavalrymen look like knights in armour from a bygone age[94 - bygone age – ушедшая эпоха] – somehow it is moving and beautiful.

We make for the equipment dump. Some of our men load the angled, sharpened iron uprights on to their shoulders, the rest stick straight iron bars through rolls of barbed-wire and carry them away. They are awkward and heavy loads.

The terrain gets more pitted. Reports come back to us from up ahead: �Watch where you’re going, there’s a deep shell hole on the left’ – �Mind the trench’ —

We keep our eyes wide open, and test the ground with our feet and with the bars before we put our weight down.

The column stops suddenly; you bang your face into the barbed-wire roll that the man in front is carrying, and you swear.

A couple of shot-up trucks[95 - shot-up trucks – подбитые повозки] are in the way. A new order comes: �Pipes and cigarettes out!’ We are close to the frontline trenches.

In the meantime it has gone completely dark. We skirt around a little copse and our sector is there before us.

There is an indistinct reddish glow from one end of the horizon to the other. It changes constantly, punctuated by flashes from the gun batteries. Verey lights[96 - Verey lights – сигнальные ракеты] go up high above it, silver and red balls which burst with a shower of white, red and green stars. French rockets shoot up, the ones with silk parachutes that open in the air and let them drift down really slowly.

They light up everything as clear as day, and their brightness even reaches across to us, so that we can see our shadows stark against the ground. The lights hang in the sky for minutes at a time before they burn out. New ones shoot up at once, everywhere, and there are still the green, red and blue stars.

�Going to be a bad do[97 - Going to be a bad do (разг.