ther that the music they made was a constant roaring which
would endure for a minute on a stretch, or half a minute anyhow. But
for all the noticeable heed which any uniformed men in my vicinity paid
to this it might as well have been blasting in a distant stone quarry.
This attitude which they maintained, coupled with the fact that
seemingly all the firing did no damage whatsoever, only served to
strengthen the illusion that after all it was not the actual business of
warfare which spread itself beneath our eyes.

Apparently most of the shells from the Allies' side--which of course was
the far side from us--rose out of a dip in the contour of the land.
Rising so, they mainly fell among or near the shattered remnants of two
hamlets upon the nearer front of a little hill perhaps three miles from
our location. A favorite object of their attack appeared to be a
wrecked beet-sugar factory of which one side was blown away.

There would appear just above the horizon line a ball of smoke as black
as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high
explosives. Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little
blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they
told us, would be shrapnel. The German reply to the enemy's guns issued
from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; and
these German shells, so far as we might judge, passed entirely over and
beyond the smashed hamlets and the ruined sugar-beet factory and,
curving downward, exploded out of our sight.

"The French persist in a belief that we have men in those villages,"
said one of the general's aides to me. "They are wasting their powder.
There are many men there and some among them are Germans, but they are
all dead men."

He offered to show me some live men, and took me to one of the
telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I
focused for distance. Suddenly out of the blur of the lens there sprang
up in front of me, seemingly quite close, a zigzagging toy trench cut in
the face of a little hillock. This trench was full of gray figures of
the size of very small dolls. They were moving aimlessly back and
forth, it seemed to me, doing nothing at all.

Then I saw another trench that ran slantwise up the hillock and it
contained more of the pygmies. A number of these pygmies came out of
their trench--I could see them quite plainly, clambering up the steep
wall of it--