Here again the trick of taking a message off the telephone and shouting it forth from the mouth of a fox burrow was repeated. Whenever this procedure came to pass a sergeant who had strained his vocal cords from much giving of orders would swell out his chest and throw back his head and shriek hoarsely with what was left of his voice, which wasn't much. This meant a fury of noise resulting instantly and much white smoke to follow. For a while the guns were fired singly and then they were fired in salvos; and you might mark how the grass for fifty yards in front of the muzzles would lie on the earth quite flat and then stand erect, and how the guns, like shying bronchos, would leap backward upon their carriages and then slide forward again as the air in the air cushions took up the kick. Also we took note that the crews of the ten-centimeters had built for themselves dugouts to sleep in and to live in, and had covered the sod roofs over with straw and broken tree limbs. We judged they would be very glad indeed to crawl into those same shelters when night came, for they had been serving the guns all day and plainly were about as weary as men could be. To burn powder hour after hour and day after day and week after week at a foe who never sees you and whom you never see; to go at this dreary, heavy trade of war with the sober, uninspired earnestness of convicts building a prison wall about themselves--the ghastly unreality of the proposition left me mentally numbed. Howsoever, we arrived not long after that at a field hospital--namely, Field Hospital Number 36, and here was realism enough to satisfy the lexicographer who first coined the word. This field hospital was established in eight abandoned houses of the abandoned small French village of Colligis, and all eight houses were crowded with wounded men lying as closely as they could lie upon mattresses placed side by side on the floors, with just room to step between the mattresses. Be it remembered also that these were all men too seriously wounded to be moved even to a point as close as Laon; those more lightly injured than these were already carried back to the main hospitals. We went into one room containing only men suffering from chest wounds, who coughed and wheezed and constantly fought off the swarming flies that assailed them, and into another room given over entirely to brutally abbreviated human fragments--fractional parts of men who had lost their arms or legs. On the far mattress against the wall lay a little pale German with his legs gone below the knees, who smiled upward at the ceiling and was quite chipper. "A wonderful man, that little chap," said one of the surgeons to me. "When they first brought him here two weeks ago I said to him: 'It's hard on you that you should lose both your feet,' and he looked up at me and grinned and said: 'Herr Doctor, it might have been worse. It might have been my hands--and me a tailor by trade!'"