Our quarters were situated near a very steep slope and were thus protected against artillery fire. They consisted of wooden shanties built by ourselves. We had brought up furniture from everywhere and had made ourselves at home; for Varennes was, after all, nearly two miles behind the front. But all the shanties were not occupied, for the number of our men diminished from day to day. At last the longed-for men from the depot arrived. Many new sapper formations had to be got together for all parts of the front, and it was therefore impossible to supply the existing sapper detachments with their regular reserves. Joyfully we greeted the new arrivals. They were, as was always the case, men of very different ages; a young boyish volunteer of 17 years would march next to an old man of the landsturm who had likewise volunteered. All of them, without any exception, have bitterly repented of their "free choice" and made no secret of it. "It's a shame," a comrade told me, "that those seventeen-year-old children should be led to the slaughter, and that their young life is being poisoned, as it needs must be in these surroundings; scarcely out of boyhood, they are being shot down like mad dogs." It took but a few days for the volunteers--all of them without an exception--to repent bitterly of their resolve, and every soldier who had been in the war for any length of time would reproach them when they gave expression to their great disappointment. "But you have come voluntarily," they were told; "we had to go, else we should have been off long ago." Yet we knew that all those young people had been under some influence and had been given a wrong picture of the war. Those soldiers who had been in the war from the start who had not been wounded, but had gone through all the fighting, were gradually all sent home on furlough for ten days. Though our company contained but 14 unwounded soldiers it was very hard to obtain the furlough. We had lost several times the number of men on our muster-roll, but all our officers were still in good physical condition. It was not until September that I managed to obtain furlough at the request of my relations, and I left for home with a resolve that at times seemed to me impossible to execute. All went well until I got to Diedenhofen.