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
places. At this end the last sentry guards about forty metres.

You can picture the contrast between all this military organisation and
the peace that used to reign here. Think what an astonishment it is to
me to remember that where I now look the labourer once walked behind his
plough, and that the sun, whose glory I contemplate as a prisoner
contemplates liberty, shone upon him freely on these heights.

Then, too, when at dusk I come out into the open, what an ecstasy! I
won't speak to you of this, for I feel I must be silent about these
joys. They must not be exposed: they are birds that love silence. . . .
Let us confine our speech to that essential happiness which is not
easily affrighted--the happiness of feeling ourselves prepared equally
for all.

_November 29, in the morning_
(from a billet).