“One would imagine that they had enough broken stone around here already,” observed Captain P---- dryly, glancing back over his shoulder to where a fresh covey of bursting shell was making the sky-line of the stone wall behind us look like a hedge of pampas plumes in a high wind. “Hope the rest of these poor fellows have taken to their holes. A little dose like we’re getting here is only a good appetiser; to stick it out as a steady diet is quite another matter.” Half a minute later we rounded a bend in the stone wall we had been hugging, to come full upon what I have always since thought of as the Anvil Chorus--three men cracking rock to metal the surface of a recently filled shell-hole in the road and singing a lusty song to which they kept time with the rhythmic strokes of their hammers. Dumped off in a heap at one side of the road was what may have been the hastily jettisoned cargo of a half-dozen motor-lorries, which had pussy-footed up there under cover of darkness--several hundred trench-bombs, containing among them enough explosive to have lifted the whole mountain-side off into the valley had a shell chanced to nose-dive into their midst. Two of these stubby little “winged victories” a couple of the singers had appropriated as work-stools. The third of them sat on the remains of a “dud 305,” from a broad crack in which a tiny stream of rain-dissolved high explosive trickled out to form a gay saffron pool about his feet. This one was bareheaded, his trench helmet, full of nuts and dried figs,--evidently from a Christmas package,--lying on the ground within reach of all three men. The sharp roar of the quickening Italian artillery, the deeper booms of the exploding Austrian shells, and the siren-like crescendo of the flying projectiles so filled the air, that it was not until one was almost opposite the merry trio that he could catch the fascinating swing of the iterated refrain. “A fine song to dance to, that!” remarked Captain P----, stopping and swinging his shoulders to the time of the air. “You can almost _feel_ the beat of it.” “It strikes me as being still better as a song to march to,” I rejoined meaningly, settling down my helmet over the back of my neck and suiting the action to the word. “It’s undoubtedly a fine song, but it doesn’t seem to me quite right to tempt a kind Providence by lingering near this young mountain of trench-bombs any longer than is strictly necessary. If that Austrian battery ‘lifts’ another notch, something else is going to lift here, and I’d much rather go down to the valley on my feet than riding on a trench-bomb.”