He disappears, swallowed up in the darkness. We wait. It rains harder and harder. The water runs in rivulets on our shoulders, trickles down our necks, soaks our shirts. From time to time we shake ourselves like wet spaniels. There is nothing to do but wait. It would not do to seek shelter. Besides, there is no shelter. When one is a sentinel in full campaign, one must accept the weather as it comes. If it is fine, so much the better; if it is frightful, too bad! It is impossible to provide comforts, or conveniences. If the sun burns you or the rain soaks you, if the heat roasts you or the cold freezes you, it is all the same. The strong resist it, the weak succumb: so much the worse! One is there to suffer, to endure, to hold his position. If one falls, his place is filled. So long as there are men, the barrier is raised and put in opposition to the enemy. “_C’est la guerre._” That is war: a condition in which only the robust man may survive; where everything unites madly to destroy, to obliterate him, where he must fight at the same time his adversaries and the elements which seem to play with him as the breeze plays with the leaf on the tree. However, the night was advancing. The Great Bear, intermittently visible between the clouds, had already gone down in the sky, and we were still there. The crowd still surged on, as dense as ever. The people came from every quarter. Very few were gathered into groups. Here and there some worn-out soldiers were seen, who asked information and vanished in haste. In the background of the dark picture of the night were the burning villages and towns, but their flames were subsiding, their ruddy glow was waning. The fires seemed to have reached the end of their food, exhausted by a night of violence. Sudden puffs of sparks rising with the smoke already foretold their extinction. Berthet, my comrade, was pale in the twilight dawn. “You have had enough of it?” I say to him. “Oh! no,” he responds, “it is nothing but nervousness.” The most critical moment was approaching: the dawning of day, that troubled moment when fatigue crushes the shoulders of the most valiant, when the vision confuses distances and blurs objects, when all one’s surroundings take on a strange, uncanny appearance. Dawn, lustreless and gray, the dawn of a day of rain, rising sulkily, drippingly, coming pale and wan to meet men broken by an anxious vigil, is not a pleasing fairy, is not the divine Aurora with fingers of light; and yet, it brings solace. With its coming the vision is extended; it pierces the fog, identifies the near-by hedge, the twisted birch, the neighboring knoll of ground. Day breaks. The shadows disappear, objects regain their natural aspect, and the terrors created by the night vanish.