At first everything went amiss here. Apart from eating our starvation rations, we had nothing to do. It was a terrible time. But contemplate them now; they are blithe enough. They are prisoners, and yet you would say they were in their own homes, masters, owners. Prisoners? They seem to be the guardians of their sentries; they go so far as to chide the sentries if these are slovenly in the performance of their duties. It is not that the prisoners have adapted themselves to the environment, but that they have forced the environment, willy nilly, to adapt itself to them. Like certain mosses which grow where there is no humus, they catch flying grains of dust and force these to yield the scanty soil which will enable them to live. Moreover, events seem to favour this natural propensity to hope. * * * * * The last thing was your card with a picture of the _Victory of Samothrace_. You had erased the title and put a date in its place. Every one came to see this bulletin of victory which I had put up beside your portrait! I wish you could have heard the comments. “Then we shall not have suffered for nothing,” said a lad from Montmédy. “I was two days in the forest with five comrades. We made holes in the trees to suck the sap. We had hallucinations. Two of them killed themselves.” Louis Ludes, a baker from Pouzolles, wounded in Morocco, and wounded again at Lunéville, the worst of wounds, a shell in the abdomen (his recovery astonished all the surgeons), exclaimed: “I too, tonnerre, I am in this victory!” And while they were looking at the beautiful Greek with the mighty wings, Dutrex, who was reading the _Burgraves_, declaimed to us in his grating bass voice, full of cruel irony, the mendicant’s apostrophe: Les Vandales ont pris Berlin! Ah! quel tableau! Les païens à Dantzig! Les Mogols à Breslau! Tout cela dans l’esprit en même temps me monte Pêle-mêle, au hasard; mais c’est horrible!… ô honte!… Allemagne, Allemagne, Allemagne.… Hélas![29] DAWN _December 8, 1914._ Half awake, I stretch out my hand to see whether Dutrex is there. His palliasse is deserted, his rug folded up. I raise myself on my elbow. All the others are still asleep, lying like long mute mummies. I draw on my shoes. At the main entrance, the sentries, hands in pockets, heads between their shoulders, are stamping their feet, their eyes white with cold. “_Guten Morgen!_”—“_Guten Morgen!_” I grope my way down the stair and along the passage. The lamps have gone out. There is a light in No. 22. I go in. Dutrex is shaving; his little mirror is perched on the vice. In front of him stands a smoky lamp. All around is darkness. Bouquet passes from one cauldron to another, singing softly and sentimentally: La petite Française Qui m’attend là-bas A les yeux de braise Le cœur de lilas.…[30]