A march across inundated fields or over roads whose puddles reflect the wan sky. I walk in the rear of the company with the Captain, who moves onwards with long, slow steps, his inevitable lance marking time against the pebbles. Two prisoners march alongside us. The Captain, a man of Lorraine, from the neighbourhood of Sarrebourg, gossips with one of them, I with the other. He is a gardener from Esslingen, near Stuttgart. I chat with him about these towns which I know well. A certain confidence having been established between us, he offers me his tin of meat. I accept it without exhibition of much pride; it is certain he will be given something to eat to-morrow, and as for us, maybe we shall get nothing. I divide the booty with my orderly and two of my men. It was excellent, that meat, surrounded with a transparent jelly. ... (Censored) ... Bread is lacking, but that does not matter. The meat suffices to fill a void. Halt at the edge of a wood on a slope. Dead leaves from last autumn still lie about, and here and there are some quite freshly yellow which the convulsion of the night has stripped from the branches. As company after company comes up the men hail one another, laughing and congratulating themselves on having escaped. Sitting amid the undergrowth, they eat what they have got. Those who have been wise enough to preserve at the bottom of their knapsacks a tin of meat have become kings. The others roam about in their vicinity, tortured by a covetousness which is plain in their eyes, burning with a desire to commandeer, yet not daring so far. Fortunate, too, beyond their fellows are those who have found in the knapsacks of captured Germans small sweetened biscuits. Many men raid the fields, returning with carrots and terrific turnips which they cut up with their pocket-knives and swallow voraciously. A night dull and cold. Lying on the bare earth of the slope, I am constantly freezing. The stones which form my bed penetrate my flesh and make me as uncomfortable as if I had as many wounds. A nightmare haunts me. It concerns the loss of my flask by one of my men who should have brought it to me filled with water, but whom I cannot find anywhere. Deeply do I regret having teased Porchon because he left his sword among the straw of his trench, while I contrived to save mine! I have my sword, I have my cap, I have my knapsack, but no longer have I my flask. And that is a loss that renders the future dark and gloomy. Still sleeping, I recall the exquisite taste of the few drops of tepid water I swallowed that night at Sommaisne, which were as balm to my arid, burning throat; I recall the spirit I gulped that very morning, and which built up anew my declining strength ... no longer a flask! What a misfortune! _Friday, September 11th._ "Attention! Fall in!"