“The soldier stands there, in the mud and the water, among the wet sandbags pierced with bullets, in the narrow labyrinths of the trenches, behind crumbling walls and among shattered tree-trunks. And that is seen from the seashore where the waves break on the beach to the Swiss frontier where the mountains rise. A hundred thousand men, at this moment, are there, every ten paces, searching the horizon. Behind the sandbags machine-guns are on the watch day and night. In these damp shelters their comrades are sleeping curled up, but ready to dash out and risk their lives at the sentinel’s first alarm, as they have done for seventeen months. Water oozes from the walls. They are silent; their eyes are looking for the Fatherland. They are lying down in their dirty overcoats, they are asleep or thinking of nothing. When the sentinel calls them, they start. They eat their soup while the water trickles down between the sacks, and they are wet through with rain. “Rusting iron covered with mud, shell-holes filled with slimy water, scattered bundles of clothes, half buried in the earth, dead bodies which have lain there for weeks, and which it has been impossible to bury, and just over there, thirty or forty or a hundred yards away, the enemy.... That is all that the soldiers see, that is their horizon, that is their world. Hundreds of thousands of vigorous men are perishing there, though their destiny was to perpetuate the human race. Death has done good business this year. Already the rats are coming from the destroyed villages and hunting about in the ground. Near Souchez, a prisoner tells me, they are arriving in formidable swarms. The crows are croaking greedily. But there is no fear and no giving way. No soldier who is at the front, right at this point, has not the right to tremble. The war is pitiless. For, by God, it is not demanding too much to ask people who are in safety to look death in the face! A dead man is a dead man, and at this moment there are much more horrible things than death. Many French and English, whose nerves have given way, have jumped on the sandbags and asked death to set them free. “And death is everywhere. It is everywhere, the whole length of the front, from the sea to the snow-mountains. Bullets whistle, mines and hand-grenades fly about, shells fired a long distance off plough into the ground with terrific explosions, a bit of trench trembles and flies into the air. Death takes officer and man without distinction. It is in the destroyed villages where the soldier is trying to rest, in the forests, in the thickets, and in the shelters where the cannons thunder, above in the air, below under the earth, everywhere. “Honour to the brave men who fall in these days.