Light by Henri Barbusse — Read

We did not leave for the trenches on the day we ought to have done. Evening came, then night -- nothing happened. On the morning of the fifth day some of us were leaning, full of idleness and uncertainty, against the front of a house that had been holed and bunged up again, at the corner of a street. One of our comrades said to me, "Perhaps we shall stay here till the end of the war."

There were signs of dissent, but all the same, the little street we had not left on the appointed day seemed just then to resemble the streets of yore!