I have written to C——.  I will write to Mme. C——.  I hope for a letter from you.  If you knew how much the longer is a day without news!  It is true I have your old letters, but the new letter has a fragrance which I now can’t do without.

November 6.

Yesterday, without knowing why, I was a little sad:  what soldiers call avoir le cafard.  My sadness arose from my having parted the day before with a book of notes which I had decided to send to you in a package.  The events of the day before yesterday, albeit pacific, had so hustled me that I was not able to attend to this unfortunate parcel as I should have liked.  Also, I was divided between two anxieties:  the first, lest the package should not reach you, and lest these notes, which have been my life from the 1st to the 20th of October, should be lost.  The second, on the contrary, was lest it should reach you before the arrival of explaining letters, which might seem strange to you, the sending-off having probably been done in another name, and the cover of my copybook bearing my directions that the notes should be forwarded to you if necessary.

* * * * *

. . .  To-day we are living in the most intimate and delicate Corot landscape.

From the barn where we have established our outpost, I see, first, the road with puddles left by the rain; then some tree-stumps; then, beyond a meadow, a line of willows beside a charming running stream.  In the background, a few houses are veiled in a light mist, keeping the delicate darks which our dear landscape-painter felt so nobly.

Such is the peace of this morning.  Who would believe that one has but to turn one’s head, and there is nothing but conflagration and ruin!. . .

November 7, 8 A.M.

I have just had your card of the 30th announcing the sending-off of a packet.  How kind this is! how much thought is given to us!  All this sweetness is appreciated to the full.

Yesterday, a delicious November day.  This morning, too much fog for the enjoyment of nature.  But yesterday afternoon!

Delicate, refined weather, in which everything is etched as it were on a misty mirror.  The bare shrubs, near our post, have been visited by a flock of green birds, with white-bordered wings; the cocks have black heads with a white spot.  How can I tell you what it was to hear the solitary sound of their flight in this stillness!—­That is one good thing about war:  there can be only a certain amount of evil in the world; now, all of this being used by man against man, beasts at any rate are so much the better off—­at least the beasts of the wood, our customary victims.

If you could only see the confidence of the little forest animals, such as the field-mice!  The other day, from our leafy shelter I watched the movements of these little beasts.  They were as pretty as a Japanese print, with the inside of their ears rosy like a shell.  And then another time we watched the migration of the cranes:  it is a moving thing to hear them cry in the dusk.