The landscape, with the little bridge and the man on horseback of which I have told you, softened under the splendour of the clouds.  But I had lapsed from my former sense of the benediction of God, when suddenly the beauty, all the beauty, of a certain tree spoke to my inmost heart.  It told me of fairness that never fails; of the greenness of ivy and the redness of autumn, the rigidity of winter in the branches;—­and then I understood that an instant of such contemplation is the whole of life, the very reward of existence, beside which all human expectation is nothing but a bad dream.

Sunday, December 13.

. . .  After a refreshing night I walked to-day in these woods where for three months the dead have strewn the ground.  To-day the vanishing autumn displayed its richness, and the same beauty of mossy trunks spoke to me, as it did yesterday, of eternal joy.

I am sure it needs an enormous effort to feel all this, but it must be felt if we are to understand how little the general harmony is disturbed by that which intolerably assails our emotions.

We must feel that all human uprooting is only a little thing, and what is truly ourselves is the life of the soul.

December 14 (splendid weather, with all the calm returned).

We are still here in the region of the first line, but in a place where we can lift our heads and behold the charm of my Meusian hills, clearing in the delicate weather.

Above the village and the orchards I see the lines of birches and firs.  Some have their skeletons coloured with a diaphanous violet marked with white.  Others build up the horizon with stronger lines.

I have been strengthened by the splendid lesson given me by a beautiful tree during a march.  Ah, dear mother, we may all disappear and Nature will remain, and the gift I had from her of a moment of herself is enough to justify a whole existence.  That tree was like a soldier.

You would not believe how much harm has been done to the forests about here:  it is not so much the machine-guns as the frightful amount of cutting necessary for making our shelters and for our fuel.  Ah well, in the midst of this devastation something told me that there will always be beauty, in man and in tree.

For man also gives this lesson, though in him it is less easily distinguished:  it is a fine thing to see the splendid vitality of all this youth, whose force no harvest can diminish.

December 15, morning.

I have had your dear letter of the 9th, in which you speak of our home.  It makes me happy to feel how fine and strong is the force of life which soon adjusts itself to each separation and uprooting.  It makes me happy, too, to think that my letters find an echo in your heart.  Sometimes I was afraid of boring you, because though our life is so fine in many ways, it is certainly very primitive, and there are not many salient things to relate.