“There you have it. This is exactly what happened. I did not lose a word or a gesture. You had better be careful. With your mania for ranging the outer regions of the fort, you will get your skin perforated one fine morning.” A BLACK MOOD _November 27, 1914._ A prey to depression, we are smoking in the “Salle du Jeu de Paume.” Laloux and Badoy, otherwise known as Badozus, are playing an interminable game of chess; d’Arnoult is reading Victor Hugo’s _Histoire d’un crime_; Noverraz is dozing over Balzac’s _Chouans_; Sergeant Scherrer, tall and thin, with cold eye and Mephistophelian head, is playing draughts with Massé, a non-commissioned officer of artillery. Seated upon the drawers of the drug cupboard, they are crowded round the solitary lamp. The table is of deal, oblong in shape, one that can be used as an operating-table. Their heads are in shadow. Elbow to elbow and forehead to forehead, the six men are silent. The circle of light is hazy with blue whorls rising from their pipes. Standing in the embrasure of the window, I am smoking my own Bavarian pipe. There is not a sound in the room, nor in the passages, nor on the bridge close to our windows. Depression must reign supreme throughout the casemates, depression which paralyses mind and body. How intense is the tedium, uncertainty, and anxiety! No letter for a whole fortnight. Yet she must be writing to me. And Léonce, my dear young brother. I wonder if it is as cold in the trenches at Ypres as it is in Bavaria. Shrapnel, bullets, sudden death. Shall I ever see him again? Is he still alive? Manech, the amiable corporal of No. 13, forty-two of whose Breton relatives have been engaged on the land front or at sea, has already lost six of them. The fighting priest, Gautin, has learned that the body of his brother lies rotting on the banks of the Marne. Sergeant Boullanger is mourning his father. Since we have begun to receive letters, almost every one is in mourning. Can it be that my own melancholy is a presentiment? When will it end, this sinister interlude in the book of peace, our book, our true book, the book of humanity? Noverraz has fallen asleep over the _Chouans_; d’Arnoult, “le Chasseur,” has closed _Histoire d’un crime_. He stretches and yawns. The others, huddled together, move their pieces without saying a word. It is cold. All our thoughts ooze despondency. This brute of a major at headquarters who, meanly, by way of reprisal, has been detaining our letters at Ingolstadt for the last fortnight! Why cannot I throw off my troubles? This evening I am like a child, like a neglected schoolboy who has ceased to hear from his mother. France, Paris, a blazing wood-fire in my study; Douchka and Katia asleep on the hearthrug. She is there!