I never go along this footpath without thinking of my friends de Bavier. I picture myself pacing the steep banks of the Dullive beneath the great dome of the trees. I sit upon my favourite bench. I look at the cool moss on the wheels of the abandoned watermill. Beneath the shifting shade of the beeches and the alders, I listen to the gurgle of the water as it flows over the stones.
This morning I seemed to be in a land of faery. Beneath every dwarf poplar the footpath and the turf were carpeted with yellow leaves, speckled with black, already decaying, and exhaling a penetrating odour of mouldering vegetation. It seemed to me that all the life of my holidays, all the faithful and pure friendship which, since adolescence, has never ceased to surround me at Dully, all the faces and the voices of this beloved house, were coming to me with the autumn vapours, rising from among the first masses of dead leaves.
At seven o’clock I was seated at my table. I found a note from the sergeant of our Bavarian guard, the man who was wounded at Lunéville. It was his farewell.
Yesterday evening he had called me into the guardroom.
“Where are you going?” I asked, when he told me that he was leaving. “Are they sending you to the front?”
“I think so. I am recalled to Kösching to join my regiment.”
“How far is Kösching?”
“About a league. The recruits are billeted there.”
“Does your wound still hurt you?”
“Yes, at night.”