able notes and their suppressed effects. But here there is more
frankness and candour. Here everything was simply rose and blue against
a pale grey ground.

My driver, getting into difficulty with his horse, entrusted the whip to
me to touch up the animal: I must have looked like a little mechanical
toy.

We passed by the Calvaries which keep guard over the Meuse villages, a
few trees gathered round the cross.

_November 24, 3.30_
(back from the march).

I have just received a letter of the 16th and a card, and a dear letter
of the 18th. These two last tell me of the arrival of my packet. How
glad I am to hear that! For a moment I asked myself whether I was right
to send you these impressions, but, between us two, life has never been
and can never be anything but a perpetual investigation in the region
of eternal truths, fervent attention to the truth each earthly spectacle
presents. And so I do not regret sending you those little notes.

My worst sufferings were during the rainy days of September. Those days
are a bitter memory to every one. We slept interlocked, face against
face, hands crossed, in a deluge of water and mud. It would be
impossible to imagine our despair.

To crown all, after these frightful hours, they told us that the enemy
was training his machine-guns upon us, and that we must attack him.
However, we were relieved; the explosion was violent.

As for my still unwritten verse, '_Soleil si pale_,' etc., it relates to
the 11th, 12th, and 13th of October, and, generally, to the time of the
battle in the woods, which lasted for our regiment from September 22nd
to October 13th. What struck me so much was to see the sun rise upon the
victims.

Since then I have written nothing, but for a prayer which I sent you
five or six days ago. I composed it while I was on duty on the road.

_November 25, in the morning._

. . . Yesterday, in the course of that march, I lived in a picture by my
beloved primitives. Coming out of the wood, as we went down a long road,
we had close by us a large farm-house, plumed by a group of bare trees
beside a frozen pool.

Then, in the under-perspective so cleverly used by my dear painters with
their air of simplicity, a road, unwinding itself, with its slopes and
hills, bound in by shrubs, and some solitary trees: all this precise,
fine, etched, and yet softened. A little bridge spanning a stream, a man
on horseback passing close to the little bridge, carefully si