We followed the commander along the main street which led to the dressing post. An aeroplane in the azure sky, a small silver bird shining in the sun, went on its giddy way. With our noses in the air, we watched it pass. The whistle of a shell approached with a noise like a panting locomotive. “There’s the last.” A frightful crash, a cloud of greenish smoke, bricks and timbers fall ... cries.... The villa we had just left re-appeared with a large yawning hole, its walls burning and fallen apart. The last shell had fallen into the dining room! His courage and coolness were not calculated or put on; they were not an effort of the will. They were natural. He was a fatalist like all who have lived long in Eastern countries. What he had above all was a powerful control of himself and a sovereign contempt for danger. He had an absolutely definite conviction that he would be killed in the next attack. He had so thoroughly accustomed himself to the idea that as a result he had made all arrangements and now awaited the hour, in the meanwhile doing his duty as a commander honorably and simply. One evening I went to greet him at his cantonment at Froissy—he was going on leave the next day—I asked him, among other things, if it would be agreeable to him, if I used his horses while he was gone. “My horses? I have no further use for them. They can’t follow me through the trenches and barbed wire—to the front; coming back ... they’ll bring me in a canvas. They’ll serve my successor.” It would have been perfectly useless to protest. After a moment of silence when he seemed to be keenly interested in the ripples of the water in the canal, he went on: “I’m going on leave to-morrow, to bid good-by to mine. That will be the last. What are you doing this evening?” “Nothing, Commander.” “Do you want to make a tour of the sector with me?” “At your orders, Commander.” By the last red rays of the sun setting on the heights to the north of the Somme, we reached the lines through the open path which passed by the camp kitchens and reached the hill of the Château de Cappy. Twilight passed, followed by the most varied colors. The red sun as it plunged behind the black poplars on the wide horizon flooded the sky with a great yellow light, fiery, burning yellow, like the gold of flames which gradually grew thin and pale, and became light like an immense head of hair. A little later mauve and violet precursors of approaching clouds passed slowly from pale to dark to end in night. The clear moon came up above the plateau of the road from Amiens. We walked on, one behind the other, in silence. He stopped to look at the sky and I heard him murmur, “How beautiful it is.” This twilight must have recalled to him the skies of the Orient. “Yes, the sunsets on the sea, in the Indies, in the Red Sea. I am homesick for the light and the sea. The light, the sea, the woman; the greatest joys, the greatest sorrows!!!” He fell into his revery again.