Discovering Aurelle in his corner, he very kindly gave him a little "Good morning" all to himself, and then he walked slowly, with his hands behind his back, between the two long tables of the telephonists. The noise of the guns had suddenly ceased, and nothing was heard in the room but the authoritative and measured step of the general. A muffled bell tingled; an operator quietly made a note of the message on a pink form. "5.5 a.m.," read the general softly, "10th Brigade. Attack begun, enemy barrage not very effective, violent machine-gun fire." Then he passed the telegram to an officer, who stuck it on a long pin. "Transmit it to the corps," said the general. And the officer wrote on a white paper: "5.10 a.m. 10th Brigade reports as follows: Attack begun. Enemy barrage not very effective. Violent machine-gun fire." He filed a carbon copy on another pin, and handed the original to an operator, who, in his turn, read it into the machine. Inflexibly and monotonously the white and pink messages slowly accumulated. One brigade was in the enemy’s first line trenches, the other had stopped before a concreted nest of machine-guns. The general reinforced them with details from the 3rd Brigade, then rang up the artillery several times to tell them to destroy the pill box. And these orders were transcribed on to the pink and white forms. An officer, standing before the huge map, carefully manoeuvred small coloured flags, and all this methodical agitation reminded Aurelle of a large banking house on the Stock Exchange. Towards six o’clock in the morning, a Staff officer beckoned to him, and, leading him up to the map, showed him the emplacement of a French .155 and asked him to go and see the officer, and tell him to destroy at all costs a certain railway cutting in which one or two enemy machine guns were still firing. The telephone was no longer working. Outside everything was calm; it was raining and the road was a river of yellow mud. The noise of the guns seemed farther off, but it was only an illusion, because one could see the wicked red light of the shells as they burst over the village in front of the house. A few wounded, in hasty field-dressings, bleeding and muddy, were coming slowly up to the ambulance in small groups. Aurelle entered a little fir wood; the wet pine-needles seemed delightful walking after the mud. He heard the guns of the French battery quite close, but could not find it. He had been told: "North-east corner of the wood." But where the devil was the north-east? All at once a blue uniform moved among the trees. At the same moment a gun went off quite close to him, and, turning to the right, he saw the gunners on the edge of the wood well hidden by some thick bushes. An adjutant, astride a chair, tunic undone, _képi_ pushed back, was in command. The men served the gun cleverly and without hurrying, like skilled workmen. One might have thought it a peaceful, open-air factory.