"Motionless, and packed tight together in cramped and painful attitudes, we shiver in silence. Our sodden clothes freeze our skin; our saturated caps bear down on our temples with slow and painful pressure. We raise our feet as high as we can before us, but often it occurs that our frozen fingers give way, letting our feet slip down into the muddy torrent rushing along the bottom of the trench. Already our knapsacks have slipped into the water, while the tails of our greatcoats trail in it." So one night was passed--and then a second. The relief was due to arrive at any moment; but would it ever appear, that relief? "As for myself, I no longer hoped for it. I had gone past caring. We had been there a long time.... No one will come. No one could possibly relieve us placed as we were, at the edge of this forest, in this trench, beneath this rain! Never again would we see houses with the lights glowing in the windows, never again see barns in which the well-packed hay never got wet. Nor ever again would we undress ourselves to rest our bodies and free them of this terrible iciness...." Then comes the end of endurance and patience: "It is no longer worth while even to trouble oneself by hoping!" Heart-rending scenes these, are they not? Is it imperative that they should be discounted? It is conceivable they may upset, even disgust, the reader; but because they cause us pain we must not shrink from them, for it is precisely through the medium of that pain that we enter into intimate contact and communion with our soldiers; in compelling ourselves to contemplate these realities, however unpalatable they may be, we learn to accord our soldiers that recognition, that admiration, that pity which is their due! Equally candid are his observations on the morale of the combatants. There are moments when they are demoralized, when they are afraid, yes, afraid! During a bombardment, for example: "With bodies hunched together, heads hidden beneath knapsacks, muscles strained and contorted, agonizedly awaiting the nerve-shattering shock of the explosions." One day the regiment just about to enter the firing-line encounters a column of wounded making for the clearing stations--a long column which seems unending, and: "It is as if, in merely showing themselves, with their wounds and their bloodstains, with their appearance of exhaustion and their masques of suffering, they had said to our men: See! It is a battle that is being waged! See what it has brought us.... Don't go on! And the men who were going forward looked upon them with faces anxious and troubled with dread, with eyes wide and fevered, in the grip of a moral tempest."