Having dodged the spectre of uncivilized life, the People are now confronted with a spectre of civilized life just as horrifying: life as an infantryman, a metaphor for the essential role of the People in any civilization. The infantrymen are making a "night march" (they are in the dark about their fate or the reasons why they fight) toward "higher broken country" (whatever faulty ideal is the goal of the leader) at "the foot of the hills" (a place no closer to the ideal life promised them).

Note that in this vision the People are not even men; they are "oblong pieces of the plain," they are "dark, shifting patches"; it takes a moment for Nostromo to resolve them as human at all, and then only as "infantry," only in their collective identity.