My knapsack caught me.  A shell screamed a second time again for us, and it struck, wallop, on the gable, while the ruins fell around my head.  I pulled at my knapsack so vigorously that I fell into the cellar, and some of our men who were there called “Here’s a poor brute done in.”  Not a bit of it.  I was not touched then either....  At last the bombardment stopped, and we all got out.  I noticed about forty hens.  Some were pulped.  Others had had their heads and legs cut off.  In the muddle three horses lay dead.  Their saddles were in ribbons.  Equipment, revolvers, swords, all that had been left above the cellar had vanished, but there were bits of them to be seen on the roof.  My rifle, which had been torn from my hands, was in fragments, and I was stupefied at not having been hit.  I noticed, however, that my wrappings that were rolled around my knapsack had been pierced by a splinter of shell that had stuck an it.  Later in the evening when I started cutting at my bread the knife stuck.  I broke the bread open and found another bit of shell in it.  I don’t yet know why I was not made mincemeat of that day.  There were fifty chances to one against me.

The two following days I stopped in the cellar, hearing nothing but their big shells, while the farm and the buildings near it were smashed in.  Now it is all over.  I am all right and bored to death mounting guard over wagons ten miles from the firing line, with a crowd of countrymen who have been commandeered with their wagons.

I ought to tell you that the two shells I saw fall on the mairie when my comrade was going there unfortunately killed one and wounded five.  It was a bit of luck for me, as I always used to be hanging about the courtyard.  That’s the sad side of it, but we have an amusing time all the same. [The writer goes on to explain how he and his friends dressed up some men of straw in uniform and induced the Germans to shoot at them, and finally to charge them, while they fired at the Germans and brought several of them down.  He continues.]

But that’s nothing to what they’ll get, and their villages will get, and their mairies, chateaux, and farms, and cellars, when we get there.  I will respect old men, women, and children, but let their fighting men look out.  I don’t mind sacrificing my life to do my duty, and to defend those I love and who love me, but if I’ve got to lose my skin I want to lose it in Boche-land.  I want the joy of getting into their dirty Prussia to avenge our beautiful land.  Bandits!  Let them and their choucroute factories look out!  If you saw the countryside we are recovering—­there’s nothing left but ruins.  Everything burned and smashed to bits.  Cattle, more dead than alive, are bolting in all directions, and as for our poor women, when I see them I would destroy everything.