the crossfire, this man and his child
squirmed their way through the barrier. They won through, and were
lifted over the barricade. As the father went stumbling past me, I
looked into the face of the girl. Her eyes were tightly closed. She
nestled contentedly.

"Did you get it, man? Did you get it?" I asked Rossiter.

"Too far," he replied, mournfully, "only a dot at that distance."

Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green grass
growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent,
waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it
revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding
daisies. The bark of it is as alarming as its bite--an incredibly rapid
rat-tat that makes men fall on their faces when they hear, like
worshipers at the bell of the Transubstantiation.

"She talks three hundred words to the minute," said Romeyn to me.

"How are you coming?" I asked.

"Great," he answered, "great stuff. Now, if only something happens."

He had planted his tripod fifty feet back of the barricade, plumb
against a red-brick, three-story house, so that the lens raked the
street and its defenses diagonally. Thirty minutes we waited, with shell
fire far to the right of us, falling into the center of the town with a
rumble, like a train of cars heard in the night, when one is half
asleep. That was the sense of things to me, as I stood in the street,
waiting for hell to blow off its lid. It was a dream world, and I was
the dreamer, in the center of the strange unfolding sight, seeing it all
out of a muffled consciousness.

Another quarter hour, and Rossiter began to fidget.

"Do you call this a battle?" he asked.

"The liveliest thing in a month," replied the lieutenant.

"We've got to brisk it up," Rossiter said. "Now, I tell you what we'll
do. Let's have a battle that looks something like. These real things
haven't got speed enough for a five-cent house."

In a moment, all was action. Those amazing Belgians, as responsive as
children in a game, fell to furiously to create confusion and swift
event out of the trance of peace. The battered giant in the Sava
released a cloud of steam from his car. The men aimed their rifles in
swift staccato. The lieutenant dashed back and forth from curb to curb,
plunging to the barricade, and then to the half dozen boys who were
falling back, crouching on one knee, firing, and then retreating. He
cheered them with