coming from below the other
lights, are our guns," he was saying. "They seem to be below the others
because they are nearer to us. Personally I don't think these evening
volleys do very much damage," he went on as though vaguely regretful
that the dole of death by night should be so scanty, "because it is
impossible for the men in the outermost observation pits to see the
effect of the shots; but we answer, as you notice, just to show the
French and English we are not asleep."

Those iron vespers lasted, I should say, for the better part of an hour.
When they were ended we went indoors. Everybody was assembled in the
long hall of the Prefecture, and a young officer was smashing out
marching songs on the piano. The Berlin artist made an art gallery of
the billiard table and was exhibiting the water-color sketches he had
done that day--all very dashing and spirited in their treatment, though
a bit splashy and scrambled-eggish as to the use of the pigments.

A very young man, with the markings of a captain on shoulder and collar,
came in and went up to General von Heeringen and showed him something--
something that looked like a very large and rather ornamental steel coal
scuttle which had suffered from a serious personal misunderstanding with
an ax. The elongated top of it, which had a fluted, rudder-like
adornment, made you think of Siegfried's helmet in the opera; but the
bottom, which was squashed out of shape, made you think of a total loss.

When the general had finished looking at this object we all had a chance
to finger it. The young captain seemed quite proud of it and bore it
off with him to the dining room. It was what remained of a bomb, and
had been loaded with slugs of lead and those iron cherries that are
called shrapnel. A French flyer had dropped it that afternoon with
intent to destroy one of the German captive balloons and its operator.
The young officer was the operator of the balloon in question. It was
his daily duty to go aloft, at the end of a steel tether, and bob about
for seven hours at a stretch, studying the effects of the shell fire and
telephoning down directions for the proper aiming of the guns. He had
been up seven hundred feet in the air that afternoon, with no place to
go in case of accident, when the Frenchman came over and tried to hit
him. "It struck within a hundred meters of me," called back the young
captain as he disappeared through the dining-room doorway. "Made qu