November 17, 11 o’clock.

The splendid weather is my great consolation.  I live rather like an invalid sent to some magnificent country, whom the treatment compels to unpleasant and fatiguing occupations.  Between Leysin and the trench where I am at present there has been only uncertainty.  Nothing new has happened to our company since October 13.

This is a strange kind of war.  It is like that between neighbours on bad terms.  Consider that some of the trenches are separated from the enemy by hardly 100 metres, and that the combatants fling projectiles across with their hands:  you see that these neighbours make use of violent methods.

As for me, I really live only when I am with you, and when I feel the splendour of the surroundings.

Even in the middle of conversations, I am able to preserve the sensation of solitude of thought which is necessary to me.

November 18.

This morning, daylight showed us a country covered with hoar-frost, a universal whiteness over hills and forest.  My little village looks thoroughly chilled.

I had spent the greater part of the night in a warm shelter, and I could have stayed there, thanks to the kindness of my superiors, but I am foolish and timid, and I rejoined my comrades from 1 o’clock till half-past 4.

Curiously enough, we can easily bear the cold:  an admirable article of clothing, which nearly all of us possess, is a flour-sack which can be worn, according to the occasion, as a little shoulder-cape, or as a bag for the feet.  In either case it is an excellent preserver of heat.

11 o’clock.

For the moment there runs in my mind a pretty and touching air by Handel.  Also, an allegro from our organ duets:  joyful and brilliant music, overflowing with life.  Dear Handel!  Often he consoles me.

Beethoven comes back only rarely to my mind, but when his music does awake in me, it touches something so vital that it is always as though a hand were drawing aside a curtain from the mystery of the Creation.

Poor dear Great Masters!  Shall it be counted a crime against them that they were Germans?  How is it possible to think of Schumann as a barbarian?

Yesterday this country recalled to my mind what you played to me ten years ago, the Rheingold:  ‘Libre etendu sur la hauteur.’  But the outlook of our French art had this superiority over the beautiful music of that wretched man—­it had composure and clarity and reason.  Yes, our French art was never turbid.

As for Wagner, however beautiful his music, and however irresistible and attractive his genius, I believe it would be a less substantial loss to French taste to be deprived of him than of his great classical compatriots.

* * * * *

I can say with truth that in those moments when the idea of a possible return comes to me, it is never the thought of the comfort or the well-being that preoccupies me.  It is something higher and nobler which turns my thoughts towards this form of hope.  Can I say that it is even something different from the immense joy of our meeting again?  It is rather the hope of taking up again our common effort, our association, of which the aim is the development of our souls, and the best use we can make of them upon earth.