To-day, at the very hour perhaps, when we let him down in his last resting place, his wife received the letter he wrote her yesterday morning. She read this letter to her child, this letter in which he announces his next arrival on leave, where he said to her, “In a week or two I shall be with you without a doubt.” He never will be now, or, rather, he is there already, for the immaterial presence of loved ones accompanies us, if it is true that they are loved and are not forgotten. And pensively, under the fine rain which is falling, we return to our cantonments. CHAPTER X AN ORDINARY FATIGUE PARTY This evening the first section has to go on the works. The men have eaten earlier than usual, and they are on the road before nightfall. The column remains in good order to the end of the cantonment, but once across the passage by the knotty elm at Harbonnières, it breaks ranks. Each one goes along as he likes, talking or alone. There is madness in the air. We prefer another order of things than to spend one evening out of two in the first line digging in the mud. “Rather the trenches where we can snooze in peace,” they say. The column trails along. Pierron, the sergeant who leads it, pays no attention. With Millazo, a tradesman from Hanoï who has arrived just recently, he talks of Indo-China, of Saigon, and their gardens. We had scarcely arrived at the end of the sunken road which opens out on an uncovered slope on top of a ridge than a well-known whistling shatters space. Each of us throws himself on the ground, in a ditch behind a tree, and the shell passes over us in the air. “That wasn’t meant for us.” Then another, still another, and dozens like it; we count up to sixty. “M ... what are they having at Proyart for dessert?” That is all the concern they have about what is going on in the rear, or about the havoc and death the bombardment is launching at this moment on the cantonment where their comrades live. That is the egotistical indifference which long experience with danger gives, and the constant contemplation of death. The column marches along more carefully and wider awake, concealing themselves from the view of the enemy’s aerial observers which are to be seen high on the horizon in spite of the late hour and the twilight which has already begun to grow dark. “Do you suppose they’ve forgotten the sausage?” “Sometimes they stay out to give us a shot.” So we wait until it is very dark before we reach our position in the works. The place where we have to dig is in the front lines. We have to construct circular dugouts for machine guns, with their rounded platforms, and to connect them with the trench by underground trenches. We climb over the trench carrying our tools in our hands and slip between the barbed wire, but we have scarcely gone a yard when a heavy fusillade warns us that this time we are spotted. We dig in. “Is anyone hit?”