shapes gather on the
slopes yonder whose vastness shows through them, slopes where our men
are in the depths of the dug-outs. Gigantic plumes of faint fire mingle
with huge tassels of steam, tufts that throw out straight filaments,
smoky feathers that expand as they fall--quite white or greenish-gray,
black or copper with gleams of gold, or as if blotched with ink.

The two last explosions are quite near. Above the battered ground they
take shape like vast balls of black and tawny dust; and as they deploy
and leisurely depart at the wind's will, having finished their task,
they have the outline of fabled dragons.

Our line of faces on the level of the ground turns that way, and we
follow them with our eyes from the bottom of the trench in the middle
of this country peopled by blazing and ferocious apparitions, these
fields that the sky has crushed.

"Those, they're the 150 mm. howitzers."--"They're the 210's,
calf-head."--"There go the regular guns, too; the hogs! Look at that
one!" It was a shell that burst on the ground and threw up earth and
debris in a fan-shaped cloud of darkness. Across the cloven land it
looked like the frightful spitting of some volcano, piled up in the
bowels of the earth.

A diabolical uproar surrounds us. We are conscious of a sustained
crescendo, an incessant multiplication of the universal frenzy. A
hurricane of hoarse and hollow banging, of raging clamor, of piercing
and beast-like screams, fastens furiously with tatters of smoke upon
the earth where we are buried up to our necks, and the wind of the
shells seems to set it heaving and pitching.

"Look at that," bawls Barque, "and me that said they were short of
munitions!"

"Oh, la, la! We know all about that! That and the other fudge the
newspapers squirt all over us!"

A dull crackle makes itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That
slow rattle is of all the sounds of war the one that most quickens the
heart.

"The coffee-mill! [note 1] One of ours, listen. The shots come
regularly, while the Boches' haven't got the same length of time
between the shots; they go
crack--crack-crack-crack--crack-crack--crack--"

"Don't cod yourself, crack-pate; it isn't an unsewing-machine at all;
it's a motor-cycle on the road to 31 dugout, away yonder."

"Well, I think it's a chap up aloft there, having a look round from his
broomstick," chuckles Pepin, as he raises his nose and sweeps the
firmament in search of an aeroplane.

A discus