We rested the night at Louvemont, a dirtier village than all the dirty villages we have come across so far. We are able to obtain milk, white cheese and a few small pots of honey. These things at least aid us to digest the anathemas Captain C---- has showered upon us since our arrival, because we have dared openly to display one or two signs of weariness. We spend a doubtful, uncertain day at Louvemont. Some heavy batteries behind the village keep firing at regular intervals, sending their heavy shells whizzing high above our heads. The Germans do not reply. For several hours we were in the fields--no one knew why--engaged in apparently aimless manoeuvres in open formation as if under curtain-fire. Did a cautious prudence dictate this course, or were our actions consequent upon certain information received? One thing at least is certain, and that is that in the evening, shortly after we had returned to the village, a dozen or so 'crumps' were sent over to us. One of them struck a house on the opposite side of the road at the moment we were sitting down to dinner. It smashed the roof--one could hear that distinctly--passed into the house, smashed a chair on which the regimental doctor had placed his tunic, and finally embedded itself in the wall without exploding. The doctor was not in the house at the time; but when he returned it was to find the copper fuse of a large 150 directly pointing towards his bed. He went out and sought more comfortable quarters. We left the village this morning. In the first place we took up a position in line of sections of four among some stunted acacias covering the side of a stony ravine. I was seated near Porchon, so exhausted and weary that from time to time I sank involuntarily against his shoulder. My brain seemed to have become pap, and my inability to think caused me almost physical pain. A single tenacious impression remained in my mind--the pursuit was ended; somewhere near here the Boches had turned, and now I must fight once more, notwithstanding this breakdown of body and mind. I felt most miserably lonely, which loneliness brought in its train a black despair I simply could not resist. Not a letter had I received from my people since the day I first set out, not a word of affection, nothing, nothing at all. And they, too, what could they know of me? Had they received the cards, scribbled in haste between the bombardments, or at the side of the road during a halt, or written in the evening in the barn, by the light of a flickering candle? They did not know in what part of the world to look for me. I had been in the battle, but they remained completely ignorant as to what had occurred to me in that battle. Anxiety would have racked them throughout these long and interminable days; and I, who would prefer death a thousand times to complete solitude, was deprived of their affectionate news so essential to my well-being.