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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
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