The splendid reds of autumn flame on the great oaks along the border of the pine-wood—a strategic wood, designed to mask the west battery. The parapets are packed with soldiers, fine blue-and-red spots upon a dull yellowish-green ground. Some, chisel in hand, silently bent over their work, are carving pebbles. Others are wearing out their finger-nails and wearing down the corner stones in polishing tablets of white chalk destined for employment as ex votos. The cries of men playing at ball and at prisoner’s base resound from the ramparts. At the foot of a slope adorned with a clump of birches, men are busily engaged in cooking their extra provender. There is a circle round each improvized kitchen: some dry and break up the small branches rifled from the trees of the fort; some tend the refractory fire, for the wood will not flame; some agitate the contents of the mess-tins—fragments of stolen meat, choice morsels of vegetable peelings, coffee dregs begged from the kitchen, potatoes pocketed when the dinner was being prepared, edible snails found on the grass on rainy mornings and kept fasting in an old cigar-box, cheese-rind, plum mushrooms, wild chicory. Soldier-priests walk up and down reading their breviaries. On one of the slopes, a crowd surrounds Le Second, who is displaying his latest cubist composition; at the “kitchen windows” a number of poor devils whose stomachs are empty are patiently sniffing the thin odours that rise from the cooking-pots. Here and there are to be seen the dealers, their wares hidden beneath their coats, passing from group to group, and offering for sale at three or four times its value a cigarette, a lump of sugar, or a stick of chocolate. The blue-and-red ants have all emerged from the subterranean galleries of their ant-hill. On this October afternoon they produce a sad impression of mingled gaiety and wretchedness.