e. He fell like a
log, without a sound, as dead as a door-nail."

There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note
which vibrated like 'cello strings, very loudly, and with that sinister
noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they passed across
the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a glitter of shrapnel
below them. From time to time they went away until they were specks of
silver and black; but always they came back again, or others came, with
new stores of bombs which they unloaded over Amiens. So it went on all
through the night.

I went up to a bedroom and lay on a bed, trying to sleep. But it was
impossible. My will-power was not strong enough to disregard those
crashes in the streets outside, when houses collapsed with frightful
falling noises after bomb explosions. My inner vision foresaw the
ceiling above me pierced by one of those bombs, and the room in which I
lay engulfed in the chaos of this wing of the Hotel du Rhin. Many times
I said, "To hell with it all... I'm going to sleep," and then sat up in
the darkness at the renewal of that tumult and switched on the electric
light. No, impossible to sleep! Outside in the corridor there was a
stampede of heavy boots. Officers were running to get into the cellars
before the next crash, which might fling them into the dismal gulfs. The
thought of that cellar pulled me down like the law of gravity. I walked
along the corridor, now deserted, and saw a stairway littered with
broken glass, which my feet scrunched. There were no lights in the
basement of the hotel, but I had a flash-lamp, going dim, and by its
pale eye fumbled my way to a stone passage leading to the cellar. That
flight of stone steps was littered also with broken glass. In the cellar
itself was a mixed company of men who had been dining earlier in the
evening, joined by others who had come in from the streets for shelter.
Some of them had dragged down mattresses from the bedrooms and were
lying there in their trench-coats, with their steel hats beside them.
Others were sitting on wooden cases, wearing their steel hats, while
there were others on their knees, and their faces in their hands, trying
to sleep. There were some of the town majors who had lost their towns,
and some Canadian cavalry officers, and two or three private soldiers,
and some motor-drivers and orderlies, and two young cooks of the hotel
lying together on dirty straw. By one of the stone