and treachery, which sets at naught the valor of both defender and assailant! VII RHEIMS When the life fantastic becomes the life ordinary, when one is at the centre of prodigious events which unroll more rapidly than the picture on the screen, and appear in ever-new guise, the astonishing thing becomes a natural thing; the unheard-of becomes the expected. A distortion of sensation is produced; the brain registers only that which surpasses the climax of what has already been experienced; as on mountain heights, peaks which have been surmounted appear low, and the climber feels that only those are high which are still above him. Thus it became the ordinary thing for Berthet and me, as for our companions, to live in the extraordinary and the supernatural. We felt quite at home in it, and moved at our ease in a situation which, for him at least, would have been untenable a few short months before. We had become soldiers like the others, eating, when we could, a meagre and coarse ration; sleeping when it was possible; in constant danger of death, but avoiding it apparently by instinct. We lived with no more care than the beasts of the field; with beards long, hands dirty. We dug in the earth, as did all the rest; we watched at the parapets with eyes puffed from lack of sleep. Uncouthness grew upon us, and we appeared, at dawn, in the glacial cold, muffled up in pieces of cloth and skins of animals; hairy, hideous, and fearsome. We were on patrol duty one night. Creeping about, we passed the listening-post and advanced on No Man’s Land. Like savages, we stalked the enemy for hours, trying to surprise some unknown men: soldiers like ourselves, who might be lost between the lines; men anxious like ourselves, and like ourselves afraid of death and suffering. Then we returned, annoyed to come back without having bagged a foe; regretful that we had not been able to spill some man’s blood. However---- “However”--thus we reasoned. Often, in the evening, when we were free between periods of sentry duty, we would delay our share of heavy sleep wherein one forgot all; when one lay stretched like a beast in a stable, on a little straw in the depth of a retreat, poorly protected from the wind and the shells. We would walk the hundred paces of the length of the communication-trench, conversing.