Artillerymen, their blouses off, their sleeves rolled, sweated in torrents as they wrestled with shells, throwing them into the breeches of their guns. Each gun was fired, and as it recoiled from the charge another shell was waiting to be thrown into the breech. The officers of the gunners, their muscles tense, their lineaments screwed up so that their faces looked like white walnuts, made quick mathematical calculations, directing the shells unerringly to strike their targets. Orderlies hurried from gun-pit to gun-pit, carrying messages from a higher officer which, when delivered to the battery commanders and passed to the gunners, would strike or spare a hundred men, an old church, or a hospital. Wagons and heavy motor-trucks rumbled over the roads leading to the forests where the long-range guns were hidden, bringing always more food for the black, extended throats of the guns. The batteries in the centre had been drawn up in a thick woods a few miles from the present front line. There, from the height of a steady swell in the earth, they were able better to watch the effects of their pounding. Between the inky mass of forest which concealed the guns and the jagged front line were the crumbling ruins of a village of which not a building now stood. The ruins were at the edge of the front line, which zigzagged unendingly in either direction. Barbed wire, rusted and ragged, was strung from posts before the trench. Chevaux-de-frise, inspiring confidence in their ability to withstand penetration, were placed at intervals, wherever gaps had been blown in the barbed wire. The space between the front line and the German listening posts was a yellowish gray. Its face was pockmarked and scabbed with tin cans, helmets, pieces of equipment. Bones, grayed in the sun and rain, were perceptible occasionally. A leather boot stuck grotesquely out of one of the unhealthy indentations in the lifeless ground. The flat chrome earth lay for several hundreds of yards and then was split by a strip of shadowy black woods. Past the woods the barren earth continued, rising and disappearing at a distance, in a hill studded with trees. Beyond lay mystery and a gargantuan demon who, taking whatever shape he chose, might descend with a huge funnelled bag from which he might extract any number of fascinatingly varied deaths. The night before, out of a still, starlit sky, a sudden rain had fallen. It had drenched the trees and the grass and soaked the clothing of the troops who were lying in the woods awaiting the hour for the attack. The rain made a long, slimy, muddy snake out of the roads leading to the front line. Where the caisson tracks had bitten into the ground, hasty rivulets now ran. Water from the evenly plotted fields had drained into the ditch that ran alongside the road, overflowing.