Noon found me well up toward the firing line, assured by the staff that it would be the day of days. To get there I passed a mile and more of batteries--the Osacca guns vomiting balls of fire, puff-balls of smoke and fat, heavy balls of steel; the howitzers--coyotes of artillery--spitting from peaks, snapping, louder than the monsters growl below; the naval six-inch turret firers, rakishly sunk in valleys, their greyhound noses dappled with mud, baying out reverberations at which even the sulking sun might have shuddered; the field four-point-sevens, bag-redoubted, conventional as pictures, flinging forth the business barks of house dogs; then, finally, the hand one-pounders, hauled well up the parallels, their bodies angled half-wise and as forlorn amid such colossal music as a penny whistle before a symphony orchestra. To be in it, to pass through it, to feel this whiz and boom people the air above with demon gossip, to sniff from ravines the gusts seeped with cordite and with phosphorus, while in the far-stretched vistas bluecoat files wind through the fierce, vain taunts hurled in among them--ah, this is the atmosphere--the grand, the fearful, the unspeakably sublime atmosphere of war. Cloudy! Yes, but what day could smile in the face of such a row as this? The grand bombardment has been on for five days. We call it the “grand” bombardment, to distinguish it from that other trifling bombardment of a few hundred field guns that was on for nearly three months. Now the big coast defense mortars from Osacca, hurling shells the size of donkeys, are ripping the lining from the doomed fortress. We cry for rest, but there is no rest. Night and day the fearful din keeps up. The paper windows of the Manchurian house where we live, two miles away, have been blown out twice by concussions. The mountains tremble. If you get within a hundred yards of the guns, you must wear cotton batting in your ears and walk tiptoe to save ear-drums. This for a ten-mile front, with infantry and regular artillery hammering the spaces out, was enough to discourage the sun. Sun, however, is an incident. War waits for no weather.