s of the men
they've buried in it. To the left, after a little clearing, there's
the forest always green and glittering. The men are in the trenches
now, the new ones that were made last week, so I suppose that we
shall be in the thick of it very shortly. That battery at the edge of
the hill has been banging away all the morning. What else is there?
There's an old pump just outside the sitting-room window. There's a
litter of dirty paper and refuse there, too, that the flies gather
round. There's an old barn away to the right where some horses are and
two cows. I have to keep my mind on these things because I know
they're real. You can touch them with your hands and they'll still be
there even if you go away--they won't walk with you as you move. So I
must fasten on to these things about which there can't be any doubt.
In the same way I like to remember that book in the sitting-room--Mr.
Glass who lectured on "Fools," the Ruysdael, and the Normal Pupils who
acted _Othello_. They're real enough and are probably somewhere now
quietly studying, or teaching, or sleeping--I envy them....

A thing that happened this morning disturbed us all. Four soldiers
came out of the Forest quite mad. They seemed rational enough at first
and said that they'd been sent out of the first line trenches with
contusion--one of them had a bleeding finger, but the others were
untouched. Then one of them, a middle-aged man with a black beard,
began quite gravely to tell us that the Forest was moving. They had
seen it with their own eyes. They had watched all the trees march
slowly forward like columns of soldiers and soon the whole Forest
would move and would crush every one in it. It was all very well
fighting Austrians, but whole forests was more than any one could
expect of them. Then suddenly one of them cried out, pointing with his
finger: "See, Your Honour--there it comes!... Ah! let us run! let us
run!" One of them began to cry. It was very disagreeable. I saw Andrey
Vassilievitch who was present glance anxiously through the window at
the Forest and then gravely check himself and look at me nervously to
see whether I had noticed. The men afterwards fell into a strange kind
of apathy. We sent them off to Mittoevo in the afternoon.

I want now to remember as exactly as possible a strange conversation I
had this evening with Semyonov. I came up when it was getting dusk to
the bedroom. One of the Austrian batteries was spitting away over the