In my heart I am glad that he is disobeying me a little and completing the work. Never was a hole dug so rapidly nor a bottle buried so nimbly. Then he puts back the earth, jumps on it to flatten it down, and throws down his sexton's spade. Then we run away at full speed, stepping on the hillocks of our dead, apologising to them inwardly. Nothing seems so ridiculous and stupid as to run under fire. But I am not alone; the safety of these soldiers is in my charge, and I should be guilty if I delayed them for as much as a second in their flight. Shrapnel is still bursting, scattering its hail around us. And how strange and subtle are the ways of modern warfare, where death comes thus seeking us out of invisible depths, depths of a horizon that looks like white cotton wool; death launched at us by men whom we can see no more than they can see us, launched blindly, yet in the certainty of finding us. We reach the car just as it has finished turning; we jump in, and off our car goes at full speed, all open. We pass the occupied trenches like a hurricane; this time heads are scarcely raised because of the shower of shrapnel. These men, to be sure, are under cover, but not so we, who have nothing but our speed to save us. In our frantic flight, in which my part is simply passive, my imagination is free to return to that gloomy cemetery and its dead. And it was strange how clearly we could hear the shrapnel in the midst of this silence and in this extraordinary mist, which increased, like a microphone, the noise of its flight. It is, moreover, perhaps the first time that I have heard it performing a solo apart from all the customary clamour, in intimacy, if I may say so, for it has done me the honour of coming solely on my account. Never before, then, had I felt that almost physical appreciation of the mad velocity of these little hard bodies, and of the shock with which they must strike against some fragile object, say a chest or a head. The game is over, and we are entering again the village of B----. Here, out of range of shrapnel, only long-distance guns could reach us. We have not even a broken pane of glass or a scratch. Instinctively the chauffeurs draw up, just as I was about to give the order, not because the car is out of breath, or we either, but we need a moment to regain our composure, to arrange the overcoats thrown into the car in a confused heap, which, after our hurried departure, danced a saraband with cameras, helmets, and revolvers. And then, like people who at last succeed in finding a shelter from a shower in a gateway, we look at one another and feel inclined to laugh--to laugh in spite of the painful and still recent memory of our dead, to laugh at having made good our escape, to laugh because we have succeeded in doing what we set out to do, and especially because we have defied those imbeciles who were firing at us. XXIII THE FIRST SUNSHINE OF MARCH _March 10th, 1916._