The road was deep in mud, and I saw the prints of _French_ boots! Then I remembered what the lieutenant had said in the morning of the gallant French reserves, and realized that I was on the exact spot where they had waited in the open behind our trenches. A rush of emotion overwhelmed me, and I wept. Suddenly in front of me I saw a mask, a _blue_ gas-mask, half buried in the mud, lying where the brave Poilu had dropped it only a few hours before. When I showed it to the major a little later, soaked with water and with _blood_, ruined and useless, he said, "Take it home to your children; you are a millionaire." Yes, a millionaire in the treasure of sentiment, by the wealth of the vision the blue mask brings to me of the comradeship of democracy in suffering and in sacrifice. Before we reached the edge of the village the batteries became busy again, but at first their objectives seemed to be well beyond the town. Then without warning the fire assumed the intensity of a barrage, and the range was shortened so that the projectiles fell all over "headquarters." Such a spectacle I had never seen before. It was as though the heavens had opened and precipitated an ocean of soil, bowlders, and trees upon the earth. No, rather the earth itself seemed to open as the result of some great sickness and vomit this terrifying spectacle upon us. The ground trembled, and the noise became literally deafening. I stood transfixed behind the runner. I was conscious of no other emotion than one of complete amazement. I had been in the midst of the former barrage, and _had not seen it_! We were perhaps one hundred and fifty yards away from this one, and so soon does one become accustomed to the eccentricities of shell-fire that we felt ourselves in no danger. We listened to the shells as they described their low arc above us, and knew instinctively whether they would land to the right or to the left, near us or relatively far away. One's judgment in these matters is much akin to his judgment of a batted ball; only he judges the shell altogether by its sound. But we were roused from our stupor. Off at our left, not far away, a shrapnel broke, the first I had _seen_ that day. For an instant I was paralyzed. The balls flew all about us; dirt spattered us; and then we ran! Straight toward that barrage we sprinted. Our one chance--and I knew it as well as the splendid fellow in front of me--was those abandoned trenches with their caved-in dugouts; we were not more than fifty yards from them. It was shrapnel now and no mistake. That we were not hit is merely one of the hourly miracles of the front. But we did reach, without being wounded, the old barbed wire with the barrage being pulled across the village and shortening in our direction, and with the shrapnel overhead. Both of us dove head first into the trench, and a good eight-foot plunge it was, into slime and water six inches deep. There we waited until the affair was over.