As for the quartermaster, he replied to everything in the repertoire of the _Eldorado_. Without stopping his juggling, he shouted at me in his amazing voice: _Moi! je m’en fous,_ _Je reste tranquil’ment_ _Dans mon trou!..._ He was going on when the infernal noise of some aerial trolley tore through space. “Attention!” he cried, without moving from his mattress. “There’s the Metro!” Almost at the same moment, a great shell, a “310” at least, burst in the court of the house opposite, demolished the roof, and crushed a dozen horses. The adjutant was just crossing the street and he stopped at the door to estimate the damage. “They missed the steeple again,” he said, with a disdainful shrug for the Boche artillery. And Morin, the drummer, by way of commentary, without interrupting his reading: “Close the door. If they send any more shells, that will make a draft.” CHAPTER III THE ECHELON From Proyart to Morcourt is five miles by a crossroad which in its many curves and windings cuts across trenches, communication trenches and barbed wire. The snow had stopped, but it still covered the ground, the trees and the farms with its regular white covering. The communication trenches showed black on this vast screen. The crows circled in innumerable flights and sought in vain for the carrion which had been so abundant for months and which, to-day, was buried. We went along, boot to boot, slowly, for the roads were slippery. Kiki wanted to dance about, for the keen air made him lively. But Zèbre’s sedateness dismayed him, and Kiki wisely ranged alongside and regulated the pace by his. The lieutenant talked but little—a few detached words, chopped phrases, about the company, an observation on the weather, a reflection on the horses. The road was almost deserted save for a few Territorials, muffled in their sheepskins, who dragged along their heavy wooden shoes which were made even higher by a thick sole of snow. From time to time a company wagon, driven like an express train, grazed us with its wheels and splashed us with mud. Then, abruptly, without having had to climb the slightest hill, we saw Morcourt, as one sees suddenly from the top of a cliff the sea at his feet, in the midst of the thousand windings of the Somme, of the canal and the turf-pits. Morcourt is a village scarcely as large as Proyart, and like it hidden in a gully sheltered from the winds on all sides, and also like it, hidden under the snow. A blacksmith had set up his forge in the open air against the walls of a tottering tile-kiln. All around the snow had melted in great black puddles where the waiting horses had pawed the ground. The smoke from his fire rose red-tinted and dark in the heavy air which seemed to muffle the ring of the hammers on the anvil.