ders in yells,
and waving their arms from behind the pieces. The cannon were sliding
over the motionless gun carriages, advancing and receding like automatic
pistols. Each charge dropped an empty shell, and introduced a fresh one
into the smoking chamber.

Behind the battery, the air was racking in furious waves. With every
shot, Lacour and his companion received a blow on the breast, the
violent contact with an invisible hand, pushing them backward and
forward. They had to adjust their breathing to the rhythm of the
concussions. During the hundredth part of a second, between the passing
of one aerial wave and the advance of the next, their chests felt the
agony of vacuum. Desnoyers admired the baying of those gray dogs. He
knew well their bite, extending across many kilometres. Now they were
fresh and at home in their own kennels.

To Lacour it seemed as though the rows of cannon were chanting a
measure, monotonous and fiercely impassioned that must be the martial
hymn of the humanity of prehistoric times. This music of dry, deafening,
delirious notes was awakening in the two what is sleeping in the depths
of every soul--the savagery of a remote ancestry. The air was hot with
acrid odors, pungent and brutishly intoxicating. The perfumes from the
explosions were penetrating to the brain through the mouth, the eyes and
the ears.

They began to be infected with the same ardor as the directors, shouting
and swinging their arms in the midst of the thundering. The empty
capsules were mounting up in thick layers behind the cannon. Fire! . . .
always, fire!

"We must sprinkle them well," yelled the chiefs. "We must give a good
soaking to the groves where the Boches are hidden."

So the mouths of '75 rained without interruption, inundating the remote
thickets with their shells.

Inflamed by this deadly activity, frenzied by the destructive celerity,
dominated by the dizzying sway of the ruby leaves, Lacour and Desnoyers
found themselves waving their hats, leaping from one side to another as
though they were dancing the sacred dance of death, and shouting with
mouths dry from the acrid vapor of the powder. . . . "Hurrah! . . .
Hurrah!"

The automobile rode all the afternoon long, stopping only when it met
long files of convoys. It traversed uncultivated fields with skeletons
of dwellings, and ran through burned towns which were no more than a
succession of blackened facades.

"Now it is your turn," said the senator to