_28th March._—The enemy leaves us in peace. Not a shell, not the least little “77.” We went hunting again and brought back a pheasant. After supper Maugenot and I intend to go and play cards with Captain Lametz, a little in front of our trenches. We must cross a glacis in front of the ridge; the bullets come over there head high. We slipped along the edge of the wood to take advantage of the lie of the land; and then all at once we said, “So much the worse,” and we crossed the field at its widest part. We jumped the parapet of an old trench and we arrived at the 1st company. Captain Lametz has his post buried in a wood. We played, seated cross-legs on the ground, by candlelight. The rest of the post were asleep, rolled up in blankets. The moonlight peered into the dug-out each time that the wind blew aside the canvas of the tent. In coming back Maugenot and I were almost stopped by bullets, chance bullets, be it understood, which fell with regularity and in disconcerting abundance, often, as they struck the ground, hitting some shell fragments which would ring like glasses knocked together. To save time Maugenot suggested taking a short cut, and he succeeded in entangling us in an inextricable network of barbed wire. It was too late to draw back, we had to jump and crawl. We arrived, however, at the hut safe and sound, but our great-coats were badly torn. _29th March._—A man had been killed some little time ago. While I write I am looking at the cortège which has brought him back. The body, a little bent, is carried on an improvised stretcher by four men and is wrapped up in the canvas of a tent, tinted red where it has touched his wound. The little procession advances with difficulty in the narrow communication trench, and every two or three steps a drop of blood falls and stains the ground like a star, brown-red, and the cortège may be traced by these as far as the grave. Such was the daily life of almost the whole army during the winter months. Though monotonous, I have thought it well to transcribe these few passages from my daily journal, for they are human documents. In spring the benumbed army stirred itself, stretched its legs and awoke to the fact that a new era was about to begin. The change took place with the greatest mystery. News, come no one knew whence, began to circulate. When we left Belgium on the 30th March some extravagant hypotheses took shape. Haute-Alsace, the Argonne, the Dardanelles and Turkey were spoken of. The least bellicose would have it that we were to rest near Lyons; but no one knew anything, and each day we went farther south-west, being ignorant even of the billets we would occupy that evening.