Star lights rose by rockets and hung suspended, gathering intensity of light till it seemed as if it hit my face, then slowly fell. The German starlights were swift and brilliant; the French steady and long continuing. "No good, the Boches' lights," said a voice out of the tunnel. A French stretcher bearer had just joined us. Other rockets discharged a dozen balls at once, sometimes red, sometimes green. Then the pattern lights began to play--the lights which signal directions for artillery fire. They zigzagged like a snake and again made geometrical figures. Some of the fifty guns, nested behind us, fired rapidly for five minutes and then knocked off for a smoke. From the direction of Hill 304 heavy guns, perhaps 220's, thundered briefly. We could hear the drop of large shells in the distance. The Germans threw a few shells in the direction of the village through which we had driven, a few toward the battery back of us. We could hear the whistle of our shells traveling west and of their shells coming east. To stand midway between fires is to be in a safe and yet stimulating situation. From the gently sloping, innocent hillocks all about us tons of metal passed high over our heads into the lines. If only one shell in every fifty found its man, as the gossip of the front has it, the slaughter was thorough. "It is a quiet evening," said my friend. It was as if we were in the center of a vast cavity; there were no buildings, no trees, nothing but distance, and the distance filled with fireworks. I once saw Brooklyn Bridge garlanded with fireworks. It seemed to me a great affair. We spoke of it for days afterward. But here in front of us were twenty miles of exploding lights, a continuous performance for four months. With our heads thrust over the tunnel edge, we stood there for four hours. The night, the play of lights, the naked hill top, left us with a sense of something vast and lonely. The Protestant clergyman came and said: "Let us go across the road to my abri." He stumbled down two steps cut in clay and bent over to enter the earth cave. "I will lead you," he said, taking me by the arm. "Wait while I close the door," he said; "we must not show any light." When the cave was securely closed in he flashed a pocket electric. We were in a room scooped out of the earth. The roof was so low that my casque struck it. A cot filled a third of the space. The available standing room was three feet by six feet. "You will forgive me for asking it," he went on, "but please use your pocket lamp; mine is getting low and I am far away from supplies. We can get nothing up here." My friend handed over his lamp. The clergyman flashed it on a photograph pinned against a plank of wood. "My wife," he said; "she is an American girl from Bensonhurst, Long Island. And that is my child."