And Poterloo and I look at each other with a kind of confused delight.  We are glad to see each other, as though we were meeting after absence!  He speaks to me, and though I am quite familiar with the singsong accent of the North, I discover that he is singing.

We have had bad days and tragic nights in the cold and the rain and the mud.  Now, although it is still winter, the first fine morning shows and convinces us that it will soon be spring once more.  Already the top of the trench is graced by green young grass, and amid its new-born quivering some flowers are awakening.  It means the end of contracted and constricted days.  Spring is coming from above and from below.  We inhale with joyful hearts; we are uplifted.

Yes, the had days are ending.  The war will end, too, que diable!  And no doubt it will end in the beautiful season that is coming, that already illumines us, whose zephyrs already caress us.

A whistling sound—­tiens, a spent bullet!  A bullet?  Nonsense—­it’s a blackbird!  Curious how similar the sound was!  The blackbirds and the birds of softer song, the countryside and the pageant of the seasons, the intimacy of dwelling-rooms, arrayed in light—­Oh! the war will end soon; we shall go back for good to our own; wife, children, or to her who is at once wife and child, and we smile towards them in this young glory that already unites us again.

At the forking of the two trenches, in the open and on the edge, here is something like a doorway.  Two posts lean one upon the other, with a confusion of electric wires between them, hanging down like tropical creepers.  It looks well.  You would say it was a theatrical contrivance or scene.  A slender climbing plant twines round one of the posts, and as you follow it with your glance, you see that it already dares to pass from one to the other.

Soon, passing along this trench whose grassy slopes quiver like the flanks of a fine horse, we come out into our own trench on the Bethune road, and here is our place.  Our comrades are there, in clusters.  They are eating, and enjoying the goodly temperature.

The meal finished, we clean our aluminium mess-tins or plates with a morsel of bread.  “Tiens, the sun’s going!” It is true; a cloud has passed over and hidden it.  “It’s going to splash, my little lads,” says Lamuse “that’s our luck all over!  Just as we are going off!”

“A damned country!” says Fouillade.  In truth this Northern climate is not worth much.  It drizzles and mizzles, reeks and rains.  And when there is any sun it soon disappears in the middle of this great damp sky.

Our four days in the trenches are finished, and the relief will commence at nightfall.  Leisurely we get ready for leaving.  We fill and put aside the knapsacks and bags.  We give a rub to the rifles and wrap them up.