THE FOREST And now I am confronted with a very serious difficulty.

There is nothing stranger in this whole business of the life and character of war than the fashion in which an atmosphere that has been of the intensest character can, by the mere advance or retreat of a pace or two, disappear, close in upon itself, present the blindest front to the soul that has, a moment before, penetrated it.

It is as though one had visited a house for the first time.

The interior is of the most absorbing and unique interest.

There are revealed in it beauties, terrors, of so sharp a reality that one believes that one's life is changed for ever by the sight of them.