Some ten men lay on mattresses listening to the musician, who was seated on a small cask, playing the same waltz over and over again, probably the only thing he knew, with his great clumsy fingers. There was something in the look of each of these men analogous to that of intoxication from opium, or to the fascination on his subject of a mesmerist. Above, the shells began to fall again; below, they had forgotten the war, because they listened to a tune they loved, and, music is all-powerful over simple hearts. I remember this episode as one of the most picturesque souvenirs of the war. I stayed in that cellar playing to them for more than an hour. They were drunk with pleasure and with dreams of home. That night I could have led them to the assault, even to the cannon’s mouth. Next day, the 24th of January, réveillé was sounded at three o’clock. At four o’clock we fell in. We were going into the second line trenches. Our “dug-out” was a little rectangular room five mètres long by two mètres wide, cut in the stiff soil, stayed up with planks, covered with beams and roofed with earth.[3] It was dark as an oven. It was entered by an opening so narrow that my pack could not pass, and to get to this door, if one could call it a door, one had to perform prodigies from the roadside onwards to avoid being bogged up to the knees. There was a little straw on the floor, and the furniture consisted of a chair. There we were going to take up our residence, my seven men and I—Dhuic, Laroche, Ponnery, Bobet, Thiérard, Emmanuel and that terrible-looking fellow Hurel, with his vulture’s face and insane alcoholic eye. I can see him now at the bottom of the trench, his face emerging from a sheep-skin coat which made him look more than ever like a wild beast. “If the Bosches catch sight of you,” an unindulgent comrade said to him, “they will certainly clear out in double-quick time.” We got here from Nieuport at four o’clock in the morning. The regiment was closed up and the men stumbled at each step over the débris of houses, which littered the road. Dead silence reigned, and the cold north wind of early morning made our eyes water. No shells or bullets were flying, but we heard from time to time the noise of tiles falling from some roof or the din of a falling skirt of wall. Star shell were being used, and each time they lit up the country they made us jumpy, for we presumed that they would be followed by a shell only too well placed.