Even the cooks, more practised in criticism than the other prisoners, had lost all sense of proportion. They handled their utensils with a terrible joy. Then the tumult was stilled. A gentle atmosphere of harmony hovered over the stoves. The cooks were silent and motionless. O memories! Sweet images in which our love of life subsists and is fulfilled. Sweet images which, at night, in the gloom and fatigue of the camp, make us weep silent tears. Sweet images which, when death threatens, rise suddenly in our minds and maintain themselves, bringing benediction, the sole realities amid the void, very angels of God! Suddenly the plutonic region burst into melody: “O moun païs! O moun païs! O Toulouso! O Toulouso!…”[15] sang Pailloux in his boy’s voice; and our Bouquet, a son of Cahors, his heart filled with thoughts of his betrothed, intoned in a mellow bass: “Vieillo villo de Cau, tan vieillo et tan fumado!…”[16] The cooks, like every one else, were bewitched with thoughts of France. For France they forgot the most serious of their immediate duties. One was allowed an entrance into the secret universe of their thoughts, as if into a public place. In the evening, when the roll-call was finished and the round was leaving with the _Feldwebel_ and our new Bavarian sergeant, only just recovered from a wound in the foot received at Lunéville, Dutrex made eyes at me, and uttered the single word, “Oui.” I went to sleep with the certainty that the news was true. To-day every one has spent the morning in writing _his_ letter, the one and only letter to which we are entitled. But what a disappointment! No more than one company is to be allowed to send letters each day. We are five companies. Only one letter every five days![17] But that melancholy barrier of silence which for a month and a half has separated us from the world has at last been broken down! It is true that we have been ordered to say nothing about the war, and to instruct our correspondents to observe a similar restriction. This morning these _Verboten_ have disturbed us little. Do you think any one of the prisoners, when writing his letter, had a fancy for dissertations upon strategy? His wife, his fiancée, his children, his mother, his whole life, were before his eyes. At length people would know that he was alive! His head was singing with voices from his own fireside. He was intoxicated—at once giddy with excitement, softened, bitter, almost mad. The most indifferent, the most torpid, seemed to have been awakened with a start. Permission to write, the act of writing, had shaken them out of their inertia.