pillars of the
vaulted room two American war correspondents--Sims and Mackenzie--were
sitting on a packing-case playing cards on a board between them. They
had stuck candles in empty wine-bottles, and the flickering light played
on their faces and cast deep shadows under their eyes. I stood watching
these men in that cellar and thought what a good subject it would be for
the pencil of Muirhead Bone. I wanted to get a comfortable place. There
was only one place on the bare stones, and when I lay down there my
bones ached abominably, and it was very cold. Through an aperture in the
window came a keen draft and I could see in a square of moonlit sky a
glinting star. It was not much of a cellar. A direct hit on the Hotel
du Rhin would make a nasty mess in this vaulted room and end a game of
cards. After fifteen minutes I became restless, and decided that the
room upstairs, after all, was infinitely preferable to this damp cellar
and these hard stones. I returned to it and lay down on the bed again
and switched off the light. But the noises outside, the loneliness of
the room, the sense of sudden death fluking overhead, made me sit up
again and listen intently. The Gothas were droning over Amiens again.
Many houses round about were being torn and shattered. What a wreckage
was being made of the dear old city! I paced up and down the room,
smoking cigarettes, one after another, until a mighty explosion, very
close, made all my nerves quiver. No, decidedly, that cellar was the
best place. If one had to die it was better to be in the company of
friends. Down I went again, meeting an officer whom I knew well. He,
too, was a wanderer between the cellar and the abandoned bedrooms.

"I am getting bored with this," he said. "It's absurd to think that this
filthy cellar is any safer than upstairs. But the dugout sense calls one
down. Anyhow, I can't sleep."

We stood looking into the cellar. There was something comical as well as
sinister in the sight of the company there sprawled on the mattresses,
vainly trying to extract comfort out of packing-cases for pillows, or
gas-bags on steel hats. One friend of ours, a cavalry officer of the
old school, looked a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Ol' Bill, with a
fierce frown above his black mustache. Sims and Mackenzie still played
their game of cards, silently, between the guttering candles.

I think I went from the cellar to the bedroom, and from the bedroom to
the cellar, six times t