out of the gun. If you're in the right line, you can even see them a
good long away from the gun."

Another follows: "There! Look, look! Did you see that one? You didn't
look quick enough, you missed it. Get a move on! Look, another! Did you
see it?"

"I did not see it."--"Ass! Got to be a bedstead for you to see it!
Look, quick, that one, there! Did you see it, unlucky
good-for-nothing?"--"I saw it; is that all?"

Some have made out a small black object, slender and pointed as a
blackbird with folded wings, pricking a wide curve down from the zenith.

"That weighs 240 lb., that one, my old bug," says Volpatte proudly,
"and when that drops on a funk-hole it kills everybody inside it. Those
that aren't picked off by the explosion are struck dead by the wind of
it, or they're gas-poisoned before they can say 'ouf!'"

"The 270 mm. shell can be seen very well, too--talk about a bit of
iron--when the howitzer sends it up--allez, off you go!"

"And the 155 Rimailho, too; but you can't see that one because it goes
too straight and too far; the more you look for it the more it vanishes
before your eyes."

In a stench of sulphur amid black powder, of burned stuffs and calcined
earth which roams in sheets about the country, all the menagerie is let
loose and gives battle. Bellowings, roarings, growlings, strange and
savage; feline caterwaulings that fiercely rend your ears and search
your belly, or the long-drawn piercing hoot like the siren of a ship in
distress. At times, even, something like shouts cross each other in the
air-currents, with curious variation of tone that make the sound human.
The country is bodily lifted in places and falls back again. From one
end of the horizon to the other it seems to us that the earth itself is
raging with storm and tempest.

And the greatest guns, far away and still farther, diffuse growls much
subdued and smothered, but you know the strength of them by the
displacement of air which comes and raps you on the ear.

Now, behold a heavy mass of woolly green which expands and hovers over
the bombarded region and draws out in every direction. This touch of
strangely incongruous color in the picture summons attention, and all
we encaged prisoners turn our faces towards the hideous outcrop.

"Gas, probably. Let's have our masks ready."--"The hogs!"

"They're unfair tricks, those," says Farfadet.

"They're what?" asks Barque jeeringly.

"Why, yes, they're dirty dodges, those gases-