There was a splendid sunrise. When I went out to greet you and the dawn upon our acacia slope, the cold was dry and sharp. The air had an agreeable aroma of fresh earth. It was a pleasure to let the eyes dwell upon the play of morning light across the open country. The cord on the flagstaff, now bearing no flag, shook in the wind and made a clicking sound as it struck the wood. For a moment from underground there came the sound of the bell rung at the elevation, a gentle, calm, and mysterious sound. It was the hour when Richeris and Guido are accustomed to serve mass for one another. In the kitchen I found Corporal Durupt at breakfast. He stood with his back to the fire, poised askew on his heron’s legs, looking, as usual, as long and thin as a hop-pole. The co-minister of Dutrex had toasted a slice of black bread sprinkled with aniseed (bread which he detests), and, rocking to and fro a little, was moistening it in his bowl. Around him the great iron cauldrons, which had been taken down from the stoves ready for the distribution, were steaming like locomotive engines. He was drinking his coffee with a thoughtful air, one which gave him a lofty, conscientious, incorruptible aspect. When he saw me his large and trusty eyes sparkled. I detected a mischievous twinkle behind his glasses. Instantly he began: “I have _grand’chose_ to tell you.” He is an Alsatian and has phrases peculiar to himself. In his vocabulary “grand’chose” means something of extreme importance. And for Durupt there is but one thing of real importance, and that is the extermination of Prussia. He hates Germany with a hatred which has been a cult in the Durupt family for generations. He went to school at Mülhausen. He took part with the Alsatian boys in terrible fights with the German boys. Thus, in his case, hatred of the Teuton was in the first instance a suggestion of childhood. But this hatred has become envenomed by experience and mature reflection. At an age when the heart begins to devote itself to the work of life, he was subjected to the forcible, rough, relentless constraint imposed by the foreign master. The daily experience of “Germanization” had filled his kindly nature with gall against everything German. “At Paris,” he says sometimes, “in the restaurants, in the post-offices, wherever I could, I plagued the life out of all the Boches who came my way!” On the banks of the Brusche, and especially at Saulxures, where the two sides were firing at one another haphazard in the fog, he killed furiously. Now, being a prisoner of war, and having neither rifle nor bayonet, he devotes himself to the endeavour to sow discouragement among the soldiers who guard us, considering that an army contaminated with discouragement is ripe for defeat.