I was not in the least humiliated by the hubbub. My condition was one of strange exaltation. I was very sad and yet fascinated—sad at the spectacle of mankind, and yet fascinated at the chance of seeing man as he really is. Tacitus, Machiavelli, Stendhal, Ferrero—not one of these writers had succeeded in giving me so strong an impression of human reality. But I will defer my comments. Thoughts conceived under the spur of hunger and in a sort of physical dementia are not likely to be just. Besides, it is difficult to keep one’s head cool when the whole world is crumbling around one. I fear lest I may have to laugh some day at the partiality of this simple and matter-of-fact story, written for some one whom I love, and in which I faithfully desire to use no colours but those of truth. Of our arrival at the fort I can recall nothing but the memory of a great iron gate which groaned on its hinges when it was opened, of a few lanterns held by sentinels running hither and thither in the darkness, of a gloomy and nauseous staircase where I stumbled and where my nailed boots made a clatter that aroused distant echoes, and of a casemate, this casemate, with cemented floor, bare, without even straw, its arches sweating damp. I threw myself on the floor, my cheek on my knapsack. My head was throbbing with fever. I spent a sleepless night, not thinking, but a prey to delirium. FEVER AND LOW SPIRITS _September 16, 1914._ The casemate is empty. My comrades have gone up to the nine o’clock roll-call. I am still “confined to my room by illness.” I am happy to be alone. It is cold. Wrapping my rug closely round me, I lie listening to the bitter wind. I am alone; I am free. It seems to me that the current of life has swept me away to the end of the world, depositing me amid dumb deserts of infinite vastness. The straw upon which I have been lying for a fortnight is reduced to powder. I roll myself in it as if it were a dust bath for chickens. How thin is my rug! My limbs shake with the cold of fever. Yesterday for a quarter of an hour I dragged myself along in the east court, but I was unable to get as far as the first glacis. When I was coming downstairs on the way back, my legs seemed heavier than hand grenades. I am very cold. Through the upper part of the two screened windows I catch a glimpse of a strip of sky, grey and heavy, crushing down on the slope, on the portcullis on the top of the slope, on the wild rose bush which breaks the straight line of the portcullis. On the steep slope I see the long grass bending before the gusts. I am alone. How delightful! What wealth! What a privilege! Here we are never alone. We sleep, we dress, we eat, we amuse ourselves, we walk about, we hunt for lice, we attend to the calls of nature, we dream, we are filled with indignation, we soften, we caress the dear relics hidden in our knapsacks, we retire into ourselves—we do all this in public.