This made the fourth time that I had made this disquieting journey. I began to feel that I had had enough of it, the more so as I had walked twelve kilomètres, and, not being accustomed to carrying a pack, my back hurt me. Clère was quite knocked up, and had looked at once so sad and so comic that I did not know whether to laugh at him or to pity him. The regiment settled in more or less (rather less) in the sector reserved for it. The cellars were crowded. My orderly, who was a treasure of devotion and very inventive, arranged my kit, found me a candle and spread a mattress. I was kept on the run, everyone called me at once: “A man wanted for the guard-room, a liaison officer to see the Captain, a man wanted for water fatigue, the quartermaster-sergeant wants to know how things are here, the 3rd troop have no billets and so on.” ... I tried to reply to everyone, and my head was like a whirlpool. It was impossible to keep the men in, though there were strict orders that they were not to leave the cellars. They broke out in every direction, and, in spite of the shells, they amused themselves like children, entering the houses at the peril of their lives. One of them brought me a stuffed stork; another a cornet and a draught screen; my orderly came last with a woman’s mantlet, trimmed with lace! Towards six o’clock the rain of shells ceased. After dinner not a sound was heard. The cold was cruel. I wrapped myself in my greatcoat and turned up the collar above my ears. I stuck my head well into my fatigue-cap and, to amuse myself, I started off on “reconnaissance,” armed with an electric lamp. I visited twenty gutted houses, and this diversion was becoming monotonous when, from a particularly damaged court, I heard a somewhat uncertain hand playing the piano. The air was one of those old waltzes which dragoons dote on and which suggest Viennese softness combined with the popular taste of the Boulevards. There was no light in the yawning house. One might have called it the house of Usher, at least I thought of that spontaneously, for there was something weird about those black holes from whence came this sad and popular jingle, though the eye was conscious of nothing but darkness. My ideas wandered for a moment, but, noticing a ray of light at my feet, I found the key of the enigma: some lascars had brought the piano down to the cellar to be more at their ease. At the foot of some ten steps, or rather of a steep slope—I learnt afterwards that, in coming down stairs, the piano had done the work of a “105”—I had only to pull a canvas curtain aside slightly to see what was going on inside. It was an affecting scene.