Abruptly, I experience a nervous reaction. I laugh.... I become a fatalist! And after?... I shall not be alone. That’s the common lot of millions of men. What is going to happen will happen. Forward. And I crawl on anew, thinking of everything else—a mass of things a hundred leagues away; trifles; paltry trifles. I surprise myself by making plans which I shall realize after the war—when that is over! And, nevertheless, death hovers over me constantly, threatening, and I am much nearer to it than life. A trench opens before me; it is not badly demolished. I enter it and find that it is an old one taken from the enemy this morning. German words indicate directions. They abandoned all their belongings. On a plank in a sentry post is a superb pair of prismatic field glasses. I pick them up—what use are they to me? I throw them down at once. I have enough to look out for close by without trying to see what’s happening farther away. “_Nach Maisonnette._” This direction before my eyes fascinates me. “To Maisonnette.” Well, I’m on the right track. If the trench continues like this I have some chance of arriving there: _nach Maisonnette_. I mark the directions at each turn of the trench, at each branch. A big shell bursts on my left and utterly destroys the whole of the wall behind me. I take another course. The devil! Suppose that should be wrong. I reach a sort of crater made up of stones and trunks of trees blown apart and broken, in one complete tangle. It would hardly be wise to stay here, for the crater is hammered full of shell holes. A voice comes out of the ground between the stones, at my feet. “Oh, good morning, Margis. Keep to the right; the first street to the left is Peronne.” I recognize the joking voice and constant laugh of Sub-Lieutenant Delpos. I have arrived; the company is here! This hole is Maisonnette! All right!... And I jump into the protection of the bottom of the sap. At last!!! White wine, brandy, fine preserves. Sub-Lieutenant Delpos never lacks for anything even in the most tragic hours of his life. He makes an elegant and comfortable dugout out of the most filthy hole. Ten miles from the living world, six feet under ground, in the midst of the shell fire, ten feet from the enemy, he offers me, with a laugh, a meal which is prodigious under the circumstances. Coharé makes coffee on a burner and he flavors it with brandy. We talk of many things, of a thousand things, all a hundred leagues removed from the war. We talk about Marseilles. Sub-Lieutenant Delpos is a lover of its picturesqueness, of its color, its sun—we are in a deep sap lighted by a smoky candle—the sun means something to us, something fairylike and superhuman. To think that at that hour there are people living under clear skies, coming and going and breathing the strong sea breeze, and drinking in with their eyes that perpetual delight—a sunset on the rocks of Frioul!