If they are to be believed, Herbebois and Chaume Wood, the village of Ornes and, in the Woevre, Fromezay and Herméville--the last two abandoned intentionally, in order to gain support on the Meuse Heights--are in the enemy’s hands. Confound those croakers! They are trying to sow the seeds of panic. Their work is certainly carried on under great difficulties. There is no job like it, except that of the scouts. And even the scouts have no load to bear: they jump lightly from shell-hole to shell-hole; they lie down, burrow themselves in, disappear, get up again, dart off like arrows, and again lay themselves out flat when the hail of bullets cuts off their road. You cannot get along very fast with twenty bowls on your back and water-bottles slung across your shoulders, or a whole grocer’s shop of tinned food, or bags filled with every kind of provender, and, to crown it all, a mask on your face which half stifles you. (The mask is worn because of all the poison-gases which linger long in the ravines and rifts in the ground, and lie in wait for you, like footpads to seize you by the throat.) The bottoms of the valleys are all but impassable. The enemy have got the range of all the roads and have battered them. The second and third lines have suffered as badly from “Jack Johnsons” as the first. Never, within the memory of men who went out on the first day of the war and have come back, Heaven knows how, from the Marne and the Yser, from Artois and Champagne, have we had to face such a deluge of fire and steel. So a cook here is a soldier who comes from the back to the front with honour as well as his burden. On the fourth day a liaison officer assures us that Les Fosses Wood and Les Caurières Wood have been lost. “They are already in the La Vauche ravine.” “In the La Vauche ravine? Then Douaumont will see them.” And now the news grows more abundant, with more men coming and going: reliefs, wounded, stragglers, fatigue parties meet on the hillsides, under the never-ending shower of shells which is aimed particularly at the fort and its immediate approaches. One needs a sober head to extract a certain measure of truth from these alarming and often contradictory reports. _They_ have been seen at Dieppe, _they_ have been seen quite near Damloup. In the end, _they_ are seen everywhere. The fort, which cheerfully digests its daily ration of projectiles, listens philosophically to these unsettling rumours. It now knows how solid its walls are. What interests it more than anything is the fate of Douaumont.