28th March.—The enemy leaves us in peace. Not a shell, not the least little “77.” We went hunting again and brought back a pheasant. After supper Maugenot and I intend to go and play cards with Captain Lametz, a little in front of our trenches. We must cross a glacis in front of the ridge; the bullets come over there head high. We slipped along the edge of the wood to take advantage of the lie of the land; and then all at once we said, “So much the worse,” and we crossed the field at its widest part. We jumped the parapet of an old trench and we arrived at the 1st company. Captain Lametz has his post buried in a wood. We played, seated cross-legs on the ground, by candlelight. The rest of the post were asleep, rolled up in blankets. The moonlight peered into the dug-out each time that the wind blew aside the canvas of the tent. In coming back Maugenot and I were almost stopped by bullets, chance bullets, be it understood, which fell with regularity and in disconcerting abundance, often, as they struck the ground, hitting some shell fragments which would ring like glasses knocked together.
To save time Maugenot suggested taking a short cut, and he succeeded in entangling us in an inextricable network of barbed wire. It was too late to draw back, we had to jump and crawl. We arrived, however, at the hut safe and sound, but our great-coats were badly torn.
29th March.—A man had been killed some little time ago. While I write I am looking at the cortège which has brought him back. The body, a little bent, is carried on an improvised stretcher by four men and is wrapped up in the canvas of a tent, tinted red where it has touched his wound. The little procession advances with difficulty in the narrow communication trench, and every two or three steps a drop of blood falls and stains the ground like a star, brown-red, and the cortège may be traced by these as far as the grave.
Such was the daily life of almost the whole army during the winter months. Though monotonous, I have thought it well to transcribe these few passages from my daily journal, for they are human documents. In spring the benumbed army stirred itself, stretched its legs and awoke to the fact that a new era was about to begin. The change took place with the greatest mystery. News, come no one knew whence, began to circulate.
When we left Belgium on the 30th March some extravagant hypotheses took shape. Haute-Alsace, the Argonne, the Dardanelles and Turkey were spoken of. The least bellicose would have it that we were to rest near Lyons; but no one knew anything, and each day we went farther south-west, being ignorant even of the billets we would occupy that evening.
So we passed Saint-Omer, Arneke, Pilens, Blingel, Frévent, Avesne-le-Comte, etc.... and we approached Arras, whose town hall and belfry we saw one morning profiled in a blue haze against a spectral sky.
On passing through Arneke on the 8th of April we marched past General Foch headed by our band. When the regiment had passed by he sent for the officers. We were all presented to him, and he had us formed up in a circle to say a few words to us.
Listening to the General was like experiencing a species of shock. He hammered out his words and scanned his phrases in a manner which made us feel ill at ease. His speech was a flagellation, and we felt a sort of moral abaissement as a result of it. His look seized upon and held us. He brought us to bay and then crushed us.
First he spoke to us of our mission, of the utility of training the men in view of the coming fatigues. “Train their arms, train their legs, train their muscles, train their backs. You possess fine qualities, draw on them from the soles of your feet, if necessary, but get them into your heads. I have no use for people who are said to be animated by good intentions. Good intentions are not enough; I want people who are determined to get there and who do.”