and then, though it rarely happens, you have in mind, if you have
ever been in front of one, the awkward possibility of a premature burst
of a shell in your face. Signs tell you where those black mouths which
you might not see are hidden, lest you walk straight into one as it
belches flame. When you have seen guns firing by thousands as far as the
eye can reach from a hill; when you have seen every caliber at work and
your head aches from the noise, the thing becomes overpowering and
monotonous. Yet you return again, drawn by the uncanny fascination of
artillery power.

Riding home one day after hours with the guns in an attack, I saw for
the first time one of the monster railroad guns firing as I passed by on
the road. Would I get out to watch it? I hesitated. Yes, of course. But
it was only another gun, a giant tube of steel painted in frog patches
to hide it from aerial observation; only another gun, though it sent a
two-thousand-pound projectile to a target ten miles away, which a man
from a sausage balloon said was "on."

XXI

BY THE WAY

The River Somme--Amiens cathedral--Sunday afternoon
promenaders--Women, old men and boys--A prosperous old town--Madame
of the little Restaurant des Huitres--The old waiter at the
hotel--The stork and the sea-gull--Distinguished visitors--Horses and
dogs--Water carts--Gossips of battle--The donkeys.

What contrasts! There was none so pleasant as that when you took the
river road homeward after an action. Leaving behind the Ridge and the
scarred slope and the crowding motor trucks in their cloud of dust, you
were in a green world soothing to eyes which were painful from watching
shell-blasts. Along the banks of the Somme on a hot day you might see
white figures of muscle-armored youth washed clean of the grime of the
firing-line in the exhilaration of minutes, seconds, glowingly lived
without regard to the morrow, shaking drops of water free from white
skins, under the shade of trees untouched by shell fire, after a plunge
in cool waters. Then from a hill where a panorama was flung free to the
eye, the Somme at your feet held islands of peace in its shining net as
it broke away from confining green walls and wound across the plain
toward Amiens.

The Somme is kindly by nature with a desire to embrace all the country
around, and Amiens has trained its natural bent to man's service.

It gave softer springs than those of any ambulance for big motor scow