"_La valse des obus_"--"The Dance of the Shells."

"Dear friends, I'm going to sing you some rhymes on the war at the
Yser."

The men to whom he was singing had been holding the Yser for ten months.

"I want you to know that life in the trenches, night by night, isn't
gay."

Two thousand men, unshaved and tousled, with pain in their joints from
those trench nights, were listening.

"As soon as you get there, you must set to work. It doesn't matter
whether it's a black night or a full moon; without making a sound, close
to the enemy, you must fill the sand-bags for the fortifications."

Every man on the hill had been doing just that thing for a year.

Then came his chorus:

"Every time we are in the trenches, _Crack!_ There breaks the shell."

But his French has a verve that no literal translation will give. Let us
take it as he sang it:

"_Crack!_ Il tombe des obus," sang the slight young Belgian, leaning out
toward the two thousand men of many colors, many nations; and soon the
sky in the north was spotted with white clouds of shrapnel-smoke.

"There we are, all of us, crouching with bent back--_Crack!_ Once more
an obus. The shrapnel, which try to stop us at our job, drive us out;
but the things that bore us still more--_Crack!_--are just those obus."

With each "_Crack!_ Il tombe des obus," the big bass-drum boomed like
the shell he sang of. His voice was as tense and metallic as a taut
string, and he snapped out the lilting line in swift staccato as if he
were flaying his audience with a whip. Man after man on the hillside
took up the irresistible rhythm in an undertone, and "Cracked" with the
singer. In front of me was being created a folk-song. The bitterness
and glory of their life were being told to them, and they were hearing
the singer gladly. Their leader was lifting the dreary trench night and
death itself into a surmounting and joyous thing.

"When you've made your entrenchment, then you must go and guard it
without preliminaries. All right; go ahead. But just as you're moving,
you have to squat down for a day and a night--yes, for a full
twenty-four hours--because things are hot. Somebody gives you half a
drop of coffee. Thirst torments you. The powder-fumes choke you."

Here and there in the crowd, listening intently, men were stirring. The
lad was speaking to the exact intimate detail of their experience. This
was the life they knew. What would he make of it?

"Despite our sufferings, w