"_Bonne chance_," said the big man, as he puffed out rings and fondled the trim bronze body of his Lady of Death. They let the car slide down the street to the left end of the barricade, where it came to rest. Over the canal, out from the smoke-misted houses, came a peasant running. In his arms he carried a little girl. Her hair was light as flax, and crested with a knot of very bright red ribbon. Hair and gay ribbon caught the eye, as soon as they were borne out of the doomed houses. The father carried the little one to the bridge at the foot of our street, and began crossing towards us. The barbed wire looked angry in the morning sun. He had to weave his way patiently, with the child held flat to his shoulder. Any hasty motion would have torn her face on the barbs. Shrapnel was sailing high overhead between the two forces, and there, thirty feet under 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."