Shivering on the cement floor of the casemate during the first night of my imprisonment here, I was continually haunted by the faces of my German friends. They did not smile at me as of old. Their eyes flashed. They glared at me like hawks. They pierced me; they wounded me. I was sad, sick at heart. How difficult it is to endure hatred. I seemed to hear bells ringing in my empty head. And always I seemed to see my friends’ eyes, strangely transformed, harsh, greedy eyes burning with ambition, cruel, the eyes of treasure-hunters, such as one sees on the friezes of Susa in the beast faces of the Assyrian kings with long perfumed beards. Here I squat in a corner of this crypt, hungry, thirsty, stupefied, my brain inert, lacking energy to do anything, looking on at my own adventures as if they were those of a stranger. Images of my experiences in the campaign, in which I seemed to have suffered fatigues beyond the limits of the credible, pass idly and almost indifferently through my mind. Already I seem to regard these experiences with indifference, like those military descriptions in Cæsar or Sallust, which no longer stir any one’s emotions. I am aware of nothing but my body. It seems strange to a man who believed himself to live upon ideas, to be reduced to become nothing but a stomach. I thought of Rabelais this morning, of Gargantua surrendering himself to his pleasures, of Frère Jean des Entommeures “wetting his whistle.” My imagination wallowed in the sensuous delights, in the gigantic satisfactions of appetite, with which the four books abound. One needs to be positively starving to appreciate to the full the groaning boards of the monk of Chinon. * * * * * Our division had been sacrificed beforehand. Charged, I imagine, to protect the retreat, it had held firm. How, and for how long? A private in modern warfare knows nothing. This much, at least, is certain, that the division was wiped out. The battle moved away from us. The sound of the cannonade became more remote. Suddenly there ensued an intense calm. Of the horrible struggle, with the noise of which my ears were still ringing, there remained no sign beyond the abominable stench of the bodies now beginning to putrefy in the fallows and the vineyards beside the forest of Bride, and from time to time, rising from the deserted hollows, the prolonged and lamentable cries of the wounded who had been abandoned. At Kerprich, in the district of Dieuze, in annexed Lorraine, I passed my first week of captivity.