wo enormous crashes outside the windows of the Hotel du Rhin. All
the windows shook and the whole house seemed to rock. There was a noise
of rending wood, many falls of bricks, and a cascade of falling glass.
Instinctively and instantly a number of officers threw themselves on the
floor to escape flying bits of steel and glass splinters blown sideways.
Then some one laughed.

"Not this time!"

The officers rose from the floor and took their places at the table, and
lit cigarettes again. But they were listening. We listened to the loud
hum of airplanes, the well known "zooz-zooz" of the Gothas' double
fuselage. More bombs were dropped farther into the town, with the same
sound of explosives and falling masonry. The anti--aircraft guns got to
work and there was the shrill chorus of shrapnel shells winging over the
roofs.

"Bang!... Crash!"

That was nearer again.

Some of the officers strolled out of the dining room.

"They're making a mess outside. Perhaps we'd better get away before it
gets too hot."

Madame from the cash-desk turned to her accounts again. I noticed the
increasing pallor of her skin beneath the two dabs of red. But she
controlled her nerves pluckily; even smiled, too, at the young officer
who was settling up for a group of others.

The moon had risen over the houses of Amiens. It was astoundingly bright
and beautiful in a clear sky and still air, and the streets were flooded
with white light, and the roofs glittered like silver above intense
black shadows under the gables, where the rays were barred by projecting
walls.

"Curse the moon!" said one officer. "How I hate its damned light"

But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and
into this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were
running close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one
doorway to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of
the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and
paving-stones were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions.
Many horses were killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding
monstrously so that there were large pools of blood around them.

An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du Rhin. He was white
under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.

"A fellow was killed just by my side." he said. "We were standing in a
doorway together and something caught him in the fac