er in the final expression of _entente cordiale_ become _entente
furieuse_.

The sunlight had the golden kindness of September and good Brother High
Visibility seemed to make it a personal matter to-day against the
Kaiser. Distinct were the moving figures of the gunners and bright was
the gleam of the empty shells dropping out of the breach of the
_soixante-quinze_ as the barrel swung back in place and of the loaded
shells going home; distinct were paths and trenches and all the detail
of the tired, worn landscape, with the old trenches where we were
sitting tumbling in and their sides fringed with wild grass and weeds,
which was Nature's own little say in the affair and a warning that in a
few years after the war she and the peasant will have erased war's
landmarks.

The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the
eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for
want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master
hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of
crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical
precision. All in due order to keep its turn in the program the German
artillery began to reply according to its system of distribution, with
guns and ammunition plentiful but inferior in quantity to the French.
They did not like that stretch of five hundred yards behind a slope
where they thought that the most troublesome batteries were, and the
puffs of shrapnel smoke thickened dimming the flashes from the bursting
jackets until a wall of mist hung there. A torrent of five-point-nines
was tearing up fresh craters with high explosives back of other gun
positions, and between the columns of smoke we saw the French gunners
going on unconcerned by this plowing of the landscape which was not
disturbing them.

Far off on the plain where a British ammunition train was visible the
German loosed more anger, whipping the fields into geysers; but the
caissons moved on as if this were a signal of all aboard for the next
station without the Germans being aware that their target was gone. A
British battery advancing at another point evidently was not in view of
the Germans two thousand yards away, though good Brother High Visibility
gave our glasses the outline of the horses at five thousand yards.

Thus, you watched to see what the Germans were shooting at, with
suspense at one point and at another the joy of the o