Day comes. The sun rises, the bright clear sun, which will be warm soon, rises over the ridge behind us. On the broad, many-colored screen of the sky with its rays of dawning day, the chimney of the distillery at Frameville, still intact and standing as though hurling defiance at the Germans, stands out monumental and black like a gigantic obelisk. The countryside never stood out so clearly. I note the slightest details with a feeling which can never be effaced. I continue to look persistently to overcome my nervousness and to have something else to think about. I look.... Below, in advance, are light lines of freshly turned earth. They are the German trenches, and I think I can see among the apparent ruins the invisible loopholes ready to belch forth death. A little further to the left, a few yards from the sides of the cliff is a small clump of woods which seems quiet and deserted. Our shells have started fires, but the fortified positions which conceal the machine guns are still there. I look.... The ground and slope in front of me, close to the parapet, is empty, bare, torn full of shell holes. Young trees have been cut down, and the fallen trees are rotting in the earth under the growing moss. But daisies, buttercups, wild poppies, and cornflowers have sprung up and blossomed, opening out to nature, the sun, and life. All the fires will shortly rage on these flowers. The blood of men will flow on them, and to-morrow their sweetness will be mingled with the charnel-house of corpses ... our corpses. Nature has never seemed to me so moving. Tears come to my eyes. It is not fear. No, it is not that. There are times when one may be afraid. Here we realize that fear is a reflex impression, ridiculous, and above all useless; that the minutes which are left are perhaps too numbered to waste in vain sentiments. But while I look through the mirage of nature, I have seen a small shriveled figure with trembling lips, and eyes hollowed with pain and fright; I have seen small hands—long, pale, emaciated hands—clasped before a photograph; I have heard the expression so many times, read it so many times in the letters on my breast, on my heart: “Tell me that you will come back. You are my all, father, mother, brother, child, husband; tell me that you will be careful, that you will come back to me,” and a slight uncontrollable, nervous trembling takes hold of me; but no one can see it. The blast of the whistle—the final order—rings out. I find myself on the slope without knowing how I came there, in the midst of the others, beside the lieutenant, at my post. Under a protecting storm of our “75’s” we advance towards our objective. The battalion has already crossed the first line of the Boche trenches without resistance. All nervousness is gone now. I am very cool. The third wave advances in front of us in good order, in step, without heavy losses. We march in their wake.