I write to you this morning from my favourite place, without anything having happened since last night that is worth recording—­save perhaps the thousand flitting nothings in the landscape.  I got up with the sun, which now floods all the space with silver.  The cold is still keen, but by piling on our woollen things we get the better of it on these nights in billets.  There is only this to say:  that to-morrow we go to our trenches in the second line, in the woods that are now thin and monotonous.  Of our three stations, that is the one I perhaps like the least, because the sky is exiled behind high branches.  It is more a landscape for R——­, but flat, and spoilt by the kind of existence that one leads there.

Hostilities seem to be recommencing in our region with a certain amount of energy.  This morning we can hear a violent fusillade, a thing very rare in this kind of war, in which attacks are generally made at night, the day being practically reserved for artillery bombardments.

Dear mother, let us put our hope in the strength of soul which will make petition each hour, each minute. . . .

* * * * *

. . .  Yes, it gives me pleasure to tell you about my life; it is a fine life in so many ways.  Often, at night, as I walk along the road where my little duty takes me, I am full of happiness to be able thus to communicate with the greatness of Nature, with the sky and its harmonious pattern of stars, with the large and gracious curves of these hills; and though the danger is always present, I think that not only your courage, your consciousness of the eternal, but also your love for me will make you approve of my not stopping perpetually to puzzle over the enigma.

So my present life brings extreme degrees of feeling, which cannot be measured by time.  Feeling produced, for instance, by beautiful leafage, the dawn, a delicate landscape, a touching moon.  These are all things in which qualities at once fleeting and permanent isolate the human heart from all preoccupations which lead us in these times either to despairing anxiety, or to abject materialism, or again to a cheap optimism, which I wish to replace by the high hope that is common to us all, and which does not rely on human events.

All my tenderness and constant love for grandmother; for you, courage, calm, perfect resignation without effort.

November 23.

DEAR MOTHER,—­Here we are arrived in our shelters in the second line.  We lodge in earth huts, where the fire smokes us out as much as it warms us.  The weather, which during the night was overcast, has given us a charming blue and rosy morning.  Unfortunately the woods have less to say to me than the marvellous spaces of our front lines.  Still, all is beautiful here.

Yesterday my day was made up of the happiness of writing to you; I went into the village church without being urged by a single romantic feeling nor any desire for comfort from without.  My conception of divine harmony did not need to be supported by any outward form, or popular symbol.