tis--little gratings of wood, placed end to
end and forming a plankway.

I look at my watch. It tells me that it is nine o'clock, and it shows
me, too, a dial of delicate color where the sky is reflected in
rose-pink and blue, and the fine fret-work of bushes that are planted
there above the marges of the trench.

And Poterloo and I look at each other with a kind of confused delight.
We are glad to see each other, as though we were meeting after absence!
He speaks to me, and though I am quite familiar with the singsong
accent of the North, I discover that he is singing.

We have had bad days and tragic nights in the cold and the rain and the
mud. Now, although it is still winter, the first fine morning shows and
convinces us that it will soon be spring once more. Already the top of
the trench is graced by green young grass, and amid its new-born
quivering some flowers are awakening. It means the end of contracted
and constricted days. Spring is coming from above and from below. We
inhale with joyful hearts; we are uplifted.

Yes, the bad days are ending. The war will end, too, que diable! And no
doubt it will end in the beautiful season that is coming, that already
illumines us, whose zephyrs already caress us.

A whistling sound--tiens, a spent bullet! A bullet? Nonsense--it's a
blackbird! Curious how similar the sound was! The blackbirds and the
birds of softer song, the countryside and the pageant of the seasons,
the intimacy of dwelling-rooms, arrayed in light--Oh! the war will end
soon; we shall go back for good to our own; wife, children, or to her
who is at once wife and child, and we smile towards them in this young
glory that already unites us again.

At the forking of the two trenches, in the open and on the edge, here
is something like a doorway. Two posts lean one upon the other, with a
confusion of electric wires between them, hanging down like tropical
creepers. It looks well. You would say it was a theatrical contrivance
or scene. A slender climbing plant twines round one of the posts, and
as you follow it with your glance, you see that it already dares to
pass from one to the other.

Soon, passing along this trench whose grassy slopes quiver like the
flanks of a fine horse, we come out into our own trench on the Bethune
road, and here is our place. Our comrades are there, in clusters. They
are eating, and enjoying the goodly temperature.

The meal finished, we clean our aluminium mess-tins or pl