on at all with the strong voices overhead coming and
going. It was as impersonal as the drive of the sea along a
breakwater.

Thus it went: a pause--a gathering of sound like the race of
an incoming wave; then the high-flung heads of breakers
spouting white up the face of a groyne. Suddenly, a seventh
wave broke and spread the shape of its foam like a plume
overtopping all the others.

"That's one of our torpilleurs--what you call
trench-sweepers," said the observer among the whispering leaves.

Some one crossed the platform to consult the map with its
ranges. A blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a little
beyond the large plume. It was as though the tide had struck
a reef out yonder.

Then a new voice of tremendous volume lifted itself out of a
lull that followed. Somebody laughed. Evidently the voice
was known.

"That is not for us," a gunner said. "They are being waked up
from------" he named a distant French position. "So and so is
attending to them there. We go on with our usual work. Look!
Another torpilleur."

"THE BARBARIAN"

Again a big plume rose; and again the lighter shells broke at
their appointed distance beyond it. The smoke died away on
that stretch of trench, as the foam of a swell dies in the
angle of a harbour wall, and broke out afresh half a mile
lower down. In its apparent laziness, in its awful
deliberation, and its quick spasms of wrath, it was more like
the work of waves than of men; and our high platform's gentle
sway and glide was exactly the motion of a ship drifting with
us toward that shore.

"The usual work. Only the usual work," the officer explained.
"Sometimes it is here. Sometimes above or below us. I have
been here since May."

A little sunshine flooded the stricken landscape and made its
chemical yellow look more foul. A detachment of men moved out
on a road which ran toward the French trenches, and then
vanished at the foot of a little rise. Other men appeared
moving toward us with that concentration of purpose and
bearing shown in both Armies when--dinner is at hand. They
looked like people who had been digging hard.

"The same work. Always the same work!" the officer said.
"And you could walk from here to the sea or to Switzerland in
that ditch--and you'll find the same work going on everywhere.
It isn't war."

"It's better than that," said another. "It's the eating-up of
a people. They come and they fill the trenches and they die,
a