sion arises, but one cannot say what the noise is, and that's
all. One tries in vain to become familiar with all those diverse
disturbances. It even happened the other day in the wood that a whole
section mistook for the hoarse howl of a shell the first notes of a
neighboring mule as he began his whinnying bray.

"I say, there's a good show of sausages in the air this morning," says
Lamuse. Lifting our eyes, we count them.

"There are eight sausages on our side and eight on the Boches'," says
Cocon, who has already counted them.

There are, in fact, at regular intervals along the horizon, opposite
the distance-dwindled group of captive enemy balloons, the eight long
hovering eyes of the army, buoyant and sensitive, and joined to the
various headquarters by living threads.

"They see us as we see them. How the devil can one escape from that row
of God Almighties up there?"

There's our reply!

Suddenly, behind our backs, there bursts the sharp and deafening
stridor of the 75's. Their increasing crackling thunder arouses and
elates us. We shout with our guns, and look at each other without
hearing our shouts--except for the curiously piercing voice that comes
from Barque's great mouth--amid the rolling of that fantastic drum
whose every note is the report of a cannon.

Then we turn our eyes ahead and outstretch our necks, and on the top of
the hill we see the still higher silhouette of a row of black infernal
trees whose terrible roots are striking down into the invisible slope
where the enemy cowers.

While the "75" battery continues its barking a hundred yards behind
us--the sharp anvil-blows of a huge hammer, followed by a dizzy scream
of force and fury--a gigantic gurgling dominates the devilish oratorio;
that, also, is coming from our side. "It's a gran'pa, that one!"

The shell cleaves the air at perhaps a thousand yards above us; the
voice of its gun covers all as with a pavilion of resonance. The sound
of its travel is sluggish, and one divines a projectile bigger-boweled,
more enormous than the others. We can hear it passing and declining in
front with the ponderous and increasing vibration of a train that
enters a station under brakes; then, its heavy whine sounds fainter. We
watch the hill opposite, and after several seconds it is covered by a
salmon-pink cloud that the wind spreads over one-half of the horizon.
"It's a 220 mm."

"One can see them," declares Volpatte, "those shells, when they come