November 19, in the morning.

MY VERY DEAR MOTHER,—­To-day I was wakened at dawn by a violent cannonade, unusual at that hour.  Just then some of the men came back frozen by a night in the trenches.  I got up to fetch them some wood, and then, on the opposite slope of the valley, the fusillade burst out fully.  I mounted as high as I could, and I saw the promise of the sun in the pure sky.

Suddenly, from the opposite hill (one of those hills I love so much), I heard an uproar, and shouting:  ‘Forward!  Forward!’ It was a bayonet charge.  This was my first experience of one—­not that I saw anything; the still-dark hour, and, probably, the disposition of the ground, prevented me.  But what I heard was enough to give me the feeling of the attack.

Up till then I had never imagined how different is the courage required by this kind of anonymous warfare from the traditional valour in war, as conceived by the civilian.  And the clamour of this morning reminds me, in the midst of my calm, that young men, without any personal motive of hate, can and must fling themselves upon those who are waiting to kill them.

But the sun rises over my country.  It lightens the valley, and from my height I can see two villages, two ruins, one of which I saw ablaze for three nights.  Near to me, two crosses made of white wood. . . .  French blood flows in 1914. . . .

November 20.

From the window near which I write I see the rising sun.  It shines upon the hoar-frost, and gradually I discover the beautiful country which is undergoing such horrors.  It appears that there were many victims in the bayonet charge which I heard yesterday.  Among others, we are without tidings of two sections of the regiment which formed part of our brigade.  While these others were working out their destiny, I was on the crest of the most beautiful hill (I was very much exposed also at other times).  I saw the daybreak; I was full of emotion in beholding the peace of Nature, and I realised the contrast between the pettiness of human violence and the majesty of the surroundings.

That time of pain for you, from September 9th to October 13th, corresponds exactly with my first phase of war.  On September 9th I arrived, and detrained almost within reach of the terrible battle of the Marne, which was in progress 35 kilometres away.  On the 12th I rejoined the 106th, and thenceforward led the life of a combatant.  On October 13th, as I told you, we left the lovely woods, where the enemy artillery and infantry had done a lot of mischief among us, especially on the 3rd.  Our little community lost on that day a heart of gold, a wonderful boy, grown too good to live.  On the 4th, an excellent comrade, an architectural student, was wounded fairly severely in the arm, but the news which he has since sent of himself is good.  Then until the 13th, terrible day, we lived through some hard times, especially as the danger, real enough, was exaggerated by the feeling of suffocation and of the unknown which hemmed us round in those woods, so fine at any other time.