Brule wine. My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed overnight.
I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of what
had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and
sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but
a bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this,
nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the
forest (and was to seem so good again later on by the canal) should
now repel me. I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment
convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once let slip in my
hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. _'Man,'_ said the
Director of the State, _'man is but the creature of circumstance.'_

As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled blindly along for miles
under and towards the brightening east. Just before the sun rose I
turned and looked backward from a high bridge that recrossed the
river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my way. I was
out of the familiar region of the garrison. The great forest-hills
that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new
light; heavy, drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed
above them. The valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of
save as a half mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of
long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes.
The main waterway of the valley was now not the river but the canal
that fed from it.

The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering the river and the
canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley as a whole was vague, a
mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the delicate
slopes bounding it on either side.