able we were, how lost, how desolate, Trenchard hearing in
every sound the death of his lady, Andrey Vassilievitch dreaming, I
fancy, that he had been caught in some cage out of which he would
never again escape. I, sick, almost blind with headache, and yet
exasperated, irritated by the emptiness of it all. If only we might
run down that hill! There surely we should find....

At the very moment when the battery had finished as it seemed to me
its work of smashing my head into pulp the wagon arrived.

"Now," I thought to myself as I climbed on to the straw, "I shall
begin to be excited!" We, all three of us, kneeling on the cart,
peered forward into the dim blue afternoon. We were very silent--only
once Trenchard said to me, "Perhaps we shall find her down here:
where we're going. What do you think, Durward?"

"I'm afraid not!" I answered. "But still she'll be all right. Semyonov
will look after her!"

"Oh! Semyonov!" he answered.

How joyful we were to leave our battery behind us. As the trees closed
around it we could fancy its baffled rage. Other batteries now seemed
to draw nearer to us and the whole forest was filled with childish
quarrelling giants; but as we began to bump down the hill out of the
forest stranger sounds attacked us. On either side of us were
cornfields and out of the heart of those from under our very feet as
it seemed there were explosions of a strange stinging metallic
kind--not angry and human as the battery had been, but rather like
some huge bottle cracking in the sun. These huge bottles--one could
fancy them green and shining somewhere in the corn--cracked one after
another; positively the sound intensified the heat of the sun upon
one's head. There were too now, for the first time in our experience,
shrapnel. They were not over us, but ran somewhere on our right across
the valley. Their sound was "fireworks" and nothing more--so that
alarm at their gentle holiday temper was impossible. Brock's Fireworks
on a Thursday evening at the Crystal Palace, oneself a small boy
sitting with both hands between one's knees, one's mouth open, a damp
box of chocolates on one's lap, the murmured "Ah ..." of the happy
crowd as the little gentle "Pop!" showed green and red against the
blue night sky. Ah! there was the little "Pop!" and after it a tiny
curling cloud of smoke in the air, the whole affair so gentle, so kind
even. There! sighing overhead they go! Five, six little curls of
smoke, and then be