Many of the new arrivals appeared exhausted and worn out. They arrived in an infected state--it was the end of October--from the ghastly slaughters in Belgium. There were several cases of tetanus and gangrene. I remember a big fellow, belonging to the naval brigade, who screamed with pain all night, and died at dawn. I found this promiscuousness very trying, and lost strength again. My friend Bujard noticed it, and, after having consulted me, arranged for me to have a little room to myself. I took leave of the sister, Ste. Thérèse. * * * * * To begin with I missed the fresh air in the ward. I was reduced to the society of my father as sole companion, and he was not well, because he had had an attack of choking one evening, in the thick of the battle of the Yser, when he had thought our line had been broken through. Bujard had warned me that he was threatened with angina pectoris. And yet with what solicitude the poor man surrounded me. He was by my side from eight o'clock in the morning onwards. He never left me during the day, and had obtained permission to have his meals brought up there. He tried everything imaginable to alleviate the monotony of my long convalescence. He joined a library so that I might have books, and tired himself by reading to me for hours together. In the end I had to implore Bujard to forbid him to read. He bought me a quantity of maps of different scales, and we tried to follow the situation, and the manoeuvres of our five principal armies during the immortal days at the beginning of September. We marked out the actual front with little flags. We talked, too. I evoked certain scenes from my childhood, our Lorraine, Eberménil. It caused my father frightful distress to think that the enemy were still there. "But not for long," he growled, grinding his teeth. If I pressed the subject and recalled some happy occasion on which our dear departed ones had figured at our sides, then I used to see him fall into a deep day-dream, into which I dared not break. He belonged to those whose grief is frozen and taciturn, more heart-rending, perhaps, than ours, which is assuaged when we give vent to it. I realised anew the difference in our two natures--not without regret! I should never have ventured, I thought, to allow him even a glimpse of the surprising evolution which had made a new man of me. It would have revolted him to learn from what depths I had started, and all that had been needed to bring me to this state of grace in which he had maintained himself without an effort, for more than forty years.