When the 1914 war was over I found myself with a small amount of demob money and a great desire to breathe some fresh air. So with no other purpose but that I set out again for the same deserted landscapes as before.

The country itself hadn't changed. But when I got beyond the dead village I could see in the distance a kind of grey mist covering the hills like a carpet. Since the previous evening I'd started thinking about the tree-planting shepherd again. "Ten thousand oaks take up a lot of room," I reflected.

I'd seen so many people die in the last five years I could easily imagine that Elzéard Bouffier must be dead too. The more so as, when you're twenty, men of fifty seem like old codgers with one foot in the grave. But he wasn't dead. On the contrary; he was still very spry. He had adopted a different calling. There were only four ewes left, but now he had about a hundred beehives. He'd got rid of the sheep because they were a threat to his trees. For, as he told me, and as I could see for myself he had taken no notice of the war and gone on imperturbably planting trees.