The near whiz of balls and shells gives you a disagreeable impression while you are climbing the hill, and suddenly you have an entirely different idea from the one you recently had of the meaning of the cannon-shots heard in the city. I do not know what placid and sweet souvenir will suddenly shine out in your memory. Your intimate _ego_ will occupy you so actively that you will no longer think of noticing your surroundings. You will permit yourself to be overcome by a painful feeling of irresolution. However, the sight of a soldier who, with extended arms, is slipping down the hill in the liquid mud, and passes near you, running and laughing, silences your small inward voice, the cowardly counsellor which arises in you in the presence of danger. You straighten up in spite of yourself, you raise your head, and you, in your turn, scale the slippery slope of the clay hill. You have scarcely gone a step before musket-balls hum in your ears, and you ask yourself if it would not be preferable to go under cover of the trench thrown up parallel with the path. But the trench is full of a yellow, fetid, liquid mud, so that you are obliged to go on in the path; all the more since it is the way everybody goes. At the end of two hundred paces you come out on a place surrounded by gabions, embankments, shelters, platforms supporting enormous cast-iron cannon, and heaps of symmetrically piled cannon-balls. These heaps of things give you the impression of a strange and aimless disorder. Here on the battery assembles a group of sailors; there in the middle of the enclosure lies a dismounted cannon, half buried in the sticky mud, through which an infantryman, musket in hand, is going to the battery, pulling out with difficulty first one foot and then the other. Everywhere in this liquid mud you see broken glass, unexploded shells, cannon-balls--every trace of camp life. You seem to hear the noise of a cannon-ball falling only two yards away, and from all sides come the sound of balls, which sometimes hum like bees, sometimes groan and split the air, which vibrates like a violin-string, the whole dominated by the sinister rumbling of cannon, which shakes you from head to foot and fills you with terror.