was as capricious as the play of a
search-light; one week, the corner and three or four other points would
catch it, the next week the corner and another set of localities. And
there were periods, sometimes ten days to two weeks long, when hardly a
shell was fired at any road. Then, after a certain sense of security had
begun to take form, a rafale would come screaming over, blow a horse and
wagon to pieces, and leave one or two blue figures huddled in the mud.
But the French replied to each shell and every rafale, in addition to
firing at random all the day and a good deal of the night. There was
hardly a night that Wisteria Villa did not rock to the sound of French
guns fired at 2 and 3 in the morning. But the average day at
Pont-a-Mousson was a day of random silences. The war had all the
capricious-ness of the sea--of uncertain weather. There were hours of
calm in the day, during which the desolate silence of the front flooded
swiftly over the landscape; there were interruptions of great violence,
sometimes desultory, sometimes beginning, in obedience to a human will,
at a certain hour. The outbreak would commence with the orderliness of a
clock striking, and continue the greater part of the day, rocking the
deserted town with its clamor. Hearing it, the soldiers en repos would
say, talking of The Wood, "It sings (ca chante)," or, "It knocks (ca
tape) up there to-day." The smoke of the bursting shells hung over The
Wood in a darkish, gray-blue fog. But since The Wood had a personality
for us, many would say simply, "Listen to The Wood."

The shell expresses one idea--energy. The cylinder of iron, piercing the
air at a terrific speed, sings a song of swift, appalling energy, of
which the final explosion is the only fitting culmination. One gets,
too, an idea of an unbending volition in the thing. After a certain time
at the front the ear learns to distinguish the sound of a big shell from
a small shell, and to know roughly whether or not one is in the danger
zone. It was a grim jest with us that it took ten days to qualify as a
shell expert, and at the end of two weeks all those who qualified
attended the funeral of those who had failed. Life at The Wood had an
interesting uncertainty.

A quarter of a mile beyond the corner, on the slope of Puvenelle
opposite The Wood, stood Montauville, the last habitable village of the
region. To the south of it rose the wooded slopes of Puvenelle; to the
north, seen across a mars