ufficiently calm acceptance of this fatality. But
sensibility is kept awake by the sight of the victims, particularly the
refugees. Poor people, truly uprooted, or rather, dead leaves in the
storm, little souls in great circumstances.

Whole trains of cattle-trucks, which can hardly be said to have changed
their use! Trains in which is heaped up the desolation of these people
torn from their homes, and how quickly become as beasts! Misery has
stripped them of all their human attributes. We take them food and
drink, and that is how they become exposed: the man drinks without
remembering his wife and children. The woman thinks of her child. But
other women take their time, unable to share in the general haste. Among
these waifs there is one who assails my heart,--a grandmother of
eighty-seven, shaken, tossed about by all these blows, being by turns
hoisted into and let down from the rolling cages. So trembling and
disabled, so lost. . . .

_September 10_ (from a note-book).

We arrive in a new part of the country on the track of good news: the
strong impression is that France's future is henceforth assured.
Everything corroborates this feeling, from the official report which
formally announces a complete success down to the most fantastic
rumours.

_September 13_ (from a note-book).

This is war; here are we approaching the place of horror. We have left
behind the French villages where peace was still sleeping. Now there is
nothing but tumult. And here are direct victims of the war.

The soldiers: blood, mud and dirt. The wounded. Those whom we pass at
first are the least suffering--wounds in arms, in hands. In most of them
can clearly be seen, in the midst of their fatigue and distress, great
relief at having been let off comparatively easily.

Farther on, towards the ambulances, the burying of the dead: there are
six, stretched on two waggons. Smoothed out, and covered with rags, they
are taken to an open pit at the foot of a Calvary. Some priests conduct,
rather than celebrate, the service, military as they have become. A
little straw and some holy water over all, and so we pass on. After all,
these dead are happy: they are cared-for dead. What can be said of those
who lie farther on and who have passed away after nights of the throes
of death and abandonment.

. . . From this agony there will remain to us an immense yearning for pity
and brotherhood and goodness.

_Wednesday, September 16, 1914._

I