lhouetted,
and then a little carriage: delicate balance of values, discreet, yet
well maintained--all this in front of a horizon of noble woods. A kind
of grey weather which has replaced the enchantment, so modern in
feeling, of the nuances of last Sunday, takes me back to that incisive
consciousness which moves us as a Breughel and the other masters, whose
names escape me. Like this, too, the clear and orderly thronging in
Albert Duerer backgrounds.

_November 26._

DEAREST MOTHER,--I didn't succeed in finishing this letter yesterday. We
were very busy. And now to-day it is still dark. From my dug-out, where
I have just arrived in the front line, I send you my great love; I am
very happy. I feel that the work I am to do in future is taking shape in
myself. What does it matter if Providence does not allow me to bring it
to light? I have firm hope, and above all I have confidence in eternal
justice, however it may surprise our human ideas. . . .

_November 28._

The position we occupy is 45 metres away from the enemy. The roads of
approach are curious and even picturesque in their harshness, emphasised
by the greyness of the weather.

Our troops, having dodged by night the enemy's vigilance, and come up
from the valley to the mid-heights where the rising ground protects them
from the infantry fire, find shelters hollowed from the side of the
hill, burrows where those who are not on guard can have some sleep and
the warmth of an Improvised hearth. Then, farther on, just where the
landscape becomes magnificent in freedom, expanse, and light, the
winding furrow, called the communication trench, begins. Concealed thus,
we arrive in the trench, and it is truly a spectacle of war, severe and
not without grandeur--this long passage which has a grey sky for
ceiling, and in which the floor is covered over with recent snow. Here
the last infantry units are stationed--units, generally, of feeble
effective. The enemy is not more than a hundred metres away. From there
continues the communication trench, more and more deep and winding, in
which I feel anew the emotion I always get from contact with newly
turned earth. The excavating for the banking-up works stirs something in
me: it is as if the energy of this disembowelled earth took hold of me
and told me the history of life.

Two or three sappers are at work lengthening the hollows, watched by the
Germans who, from point to point, can snipe the insufficiently protected