g."

"No matter--they're off their onions to go out under such shelling."

"Gunners, my boy," says a man of another company who was strolling in
the trench, "are either quite good or quite bad. Either they're trumps
or they're trash. I tell you--"

"That's true of all privates, what you're saying."

"Possibly; but I'm not talking to you about all privates; I'm talking
to you about gunners, and I tell you too that--"

"Hey, my lads! Better find a hole to dump yourselves in, before you get
one on the snitch!"

The strolling stranger carried his story away, and Cocon, who was in a
perverse mood, declared: "We can be doing our hair in the dug-out,
seeing it's rather boring outside."

"Look, they're sending torpedoes over there!" said Paradis, pointing.
Torpedoes go straight up, or very nearly so, like larks, fluttering and
rustling; then they stop, hesitate, and come straight down again,
heralding their fall in its last seconds by a "baby-cry" that we know
well. From here, the inhabitants of the ridge seem like invisible
players, lined up for a game with a ball.

"In the Argonne," says Lamuse, "my brother says in a letter that they
get turtle-doves, as he calls them. They're big heavy things, fired off
very close. They come in cooing, really they do, he says, and when they
break wind they don't half make a shindy, he says."

"There's nothing worse than the mortar-toad, that seems to chase after
you and jump over the top of you, and it bursts in the very trench,
just scraping over the bank."

"Tiens, tiens, did you hear it?" A whistling was approaching us when
suddenly it ceased. The contrivance has not burst. "It's a shell that
cried off," Paradis asserts. And we strain our ears for the
satisfaction of hearing--or of not hearing--others.

Lamuse says: "All the fields and the roads and the villages about here,
they're covered with dud shells of all sizes--ours as well, to say
truth. The ground must be full of 'em, that you can't see. I wonder how
they'll go on, later, when the time comes to say, 'That's enough of it,
let's start work again.'"

And all the time, in a monotony of madness, the avalanche of fire and
iron goes on; shrapnel with its whistling explosion and its overcharged
heart of furious metal and the great percussion shells, whose thunder
is that of the railway engine which crashes suddenly into a wall, the
thunder of loaded rails or steel beams, toppling down a declivity. The
air is now glutted a