Everything is impregnated with coal. There is no barrier or filter against this microbe. Bathing in floods of water, brushing and scraping does not chase it from its lairs. In our food our teeth encounter crunching lumps; our hair is tarnished with a black cosmetic; and the folds of our whitest linen conceal little hoards of soot. Our whitest linen! Is there a world where they know the pleasure of immaculate shirts? Of handkerchiefs pure as snow? When we set out, each one of us took along only what was strictly necessary. Our boxes are few, and in a day we soil more than in a week of peace. Where are the washes of other days? where the polite laundresses of the ports, who washed the linen and cambric in twenty-four hours? Our cruises last eight or nine weeks. How many times already I have washed in my basin two handkerchiefs and a shirt so covered with coaldust that the white places spotted it! Like all my comrades I have a sailor at my service. But he is a good gunner, who only looks after me when his duties do not call him elsewhere. Every day he has ten hours of lookout and three or four of preparation of materials. Must he not sleep and eat? When he is free, I try to take a few hours of broken rest on my bunk, and he respects my sleep. When my cabin is empty, he is watching behind his gun. Each one of us washes what he can. The soft water we use does not come from clear fountains, but from the boiler tubes which distil the sea-water; it stands in great metal casks, it is filled with rust and retains the color of it. In vain we throw in soap and borax; the washed linen turns yellow as if powdered with mustard, and it is never quite dry. The falling rains, the smoke which sweeps the deck, do not permit hanging it outdoors. In my cabin my gunner has stretched two strings between the port hole and the moulding above my bunk, and up there the linen dries as well as it can. Sometimes, while I sleep or work, an idle drop falls on my face or my paper; other times the constant vibration of the cruiser throws the linen to the coal-stained linoleum, and the whole thing has to be done over again. In the “naval army,” as in the trenches, nothing is clean but the wind. As in the trenches, too, we try to kill time, which lags so terribly. The study of the military map is misleading; we are accustomed, as each communiqué is received by wireless, to stick flags on the Western and Eastern fronts. The pins change every day by a quarter or a tenth of a millimeter; they have made so many holes in the paper that one can no longer read the names, and we have given up taking them out. Bundles of papers arrive in each mail, are quickly read and thrown aside; they feed neither our conversation nor our reveries. We brought no books from France because we thought them superfluous in a short war, and those we have ordered for these interminable cruises have not yet come. Letters are quickly written when one has nothing much to say and the censor forbids details.