and over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn.

"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!" It sailed over our heads behind the trench, there
was an instant's silence, and then "Whong!" and a pile of dirt and black
smoke was flung in the air. Again there was a dull report, and we sent
a second back--this time behind their trench--and again--"Vorsicht!
Vorsicht!"--they sent an answer back. Four times this was repeated. A
quainter way of making war it would be hard to imagine. They might have
been boys playing "anty-over" over the old house at home.

Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power. If thrown in the open
they go off on the surface much like a gigantic firecracker. They are
easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at
night as part of a general bombardment, including shrapnel and heavy
explosive shells, or exploding directly in the trench, they must be
decidedly unpleasant.

The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and myself waiting on one
side of the bend in the trench toward which the bombs were thrown, the
others going ahead. It was several minutes before I rejoined them, and
I did not learn until we were outside that they had been taken to
another periscope through which they saw a space covered with English
dead. There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they
said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot
of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack
which had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle. Several Englishmen had got clear
into the German trench before they were killed. Here was another
example of the curious localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could
pass within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not know even that
it was there.

By another communication trench we returned to the little house. The
sun was low by this time and the line of figures walking down the-road
toward the automobiles in its full light. Perhaps the glasses of some
British lookout picked us up--at any rate the whisper of bullets became
uncomfortably frequent and near, and we had just got to the motors when
--Tssee--ee--rr... BONG! a shell crashed into the church of La Bassee,
only three hundred yards in front of us.

Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower trajectory, it
seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to
the first motor that it threw mud into it. Apparently we were both
obs