“The telephone bell rings. ‘Are you there? Yes, here’s Nau’s battalion.’ ‘Good. That is all.’ Then that ceases, and now the wire is in again perhaps for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time. Thus the night is interrupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after the other, each more terrifying than the other, of enormous losses through the bombs and shells of the enemy, of huge masses of troops advancing upon us, of all possible possibilities, such as a train broken down, and we are tortured by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our nerves quiver. We clench our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors of the night.”

Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy.

“Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out the trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G⁠⸺. We were to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in every limb, poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again.”