Very hot. Out there in the _Champagne Pouilleuse_ men are marching in the white dust, resting in the white dust, giving up their lives in the white dust. Am sitting under the chestnut-tree. A soldier, in civil life a gardener, has been sent to tidy up our garden, and its _belle patine_ will soon give way to spick-and-spanness. I sensed such a passion of tenderness in the way he handled his rake that I went over to speak to him, and this is his history. He is from Cette—_une ville si jolie_—and he speaks with the heavy accent of his part of the world. He is a territorial and forms part of the _État-Civil des Champs de Bataille_ (civilian workers on the battle-fields). This doesn’t sound bad, but it really means that since he was called, eighteen months ago, he, who all his life has planted flowers, has been digging up dead bodies, hunting in a literal “body of death” to find the plaques, and then identifying by means of a map the place where they are found. “_Madame, je rien pouvais plus._ It was too terrible. I am forty-seven years old, but I asked to be put among the attacking troops. They refused, but sent me here. Now in this garden I have found heaven again.” And his eyes, his soft, suffering eyes, filled with tears. I asked him about his family—one son is fighting in the Vosges. “He is six feet four and he so resembles Albert I that they call him _le roi des Belges_. I lost my daughter a few months ago—a beautiful girl with curling blond hair. After her fiancé fell at Verdun, she went into a decline. My other son is young, seventeen, but his turn is near. I had a beautiful family.” The gardener himself is straight-featured and straight-browed, caught up how terribly in the wine-press of the war. “All my life I have been gardener in great houses,” he added, with a shudder. “The work they gave me _là-bas_ is the most terrible of all. _On n’y résiste pas à la longue. O les pauvres restes qu’on trouve! O, Madame!_” I asked him to bring me the photographs of his family, and his face brightened for a moment as he stood with his head uncovered. One speaks to any chance person, and immediately one gets a story that is fit only to be handled by some master of that incomparable thing, French prose. _Later._