"Those, they're the 150 mm. howitzers."--"They're the 210's, calf-head."--"There go the regular guns, too; the hogs! Look at that one!" It was a shell that burst on the ground and threw up earth and debris in a fan-shaped cloud of darkness. Across the cloven land it looked like the frightful spitting of some volcano, piled up in the bowels of the earth. A diabolical uproar surrounds us. We are conscious of a sustained crescendo, an incessant multiplication of the universal frenzy. A hurricane of hoarse and hollow banging, of raging clamor, of piercing and beast-like screams, fastens furiously with tatters of smoke upon the earth where we are buried up to our necks, and the wind of the shells seems to set it heaving and pitching. "Look at that," bawls Barque, "and me that said they were short of munitions!" "Oh, la, la! We know all about that! That and the other fudge the newspapers squirt all over us!" A dull crackle makes itself audible amidst the babel of noise. That slow rattle is of all the sounds of war the one that most quickens the heart. "The coffee-mill! [note 1] One of ours, listen. The shots come regularly, while the Boches' haven't got the same length of time between the shots; they go crack--crack-crack-crack--crack-crack--crack--" "Don't cod yourself, crack-pate; it isn't an unsewing-machine at all; it's a motor-cycle on the road to 31 dugout, away yonder." "Well, I think it's a chap up aloft there, having a look round from his broomstick," chuckles Pepin, as he raises his nose and sweeps the firmament in search of an aeroplane. A discussion arises, but one cannot say what the noise is, and that's all. One tries in vain to become familiar with all those diverse disturbances. It even happened the other day in the wood that a whole section mistook for the hoarse howl of a shell the first notes of a neighboring mule as he began his whinnying bray. "I say, there's a good show of sausages in the air this morning," says Lamuse. Lifting our eyes, we count them. "There are eight sausages on our side and eight on the Boches'," says Cocon, who has already counted them. There are, in fact, at regular intervals along the horizon, opposite the distance-dwindled group of captive enemy balloons, the eight long hovering eyes of the army, buoyant and sensitive, and joined to the various headquarters by living threads. "They see us as we see them. How the devil can one escape from that row of God Almighties up there?" There's our reply! Suddenly, behind our backs, there bursts the sharp and deafening stridor of the 75's. Their increasing crackling thunder arouses and elates us. We shout with our guns, and look at each other without hearing our shouts--except for the curiously piercing voice that comes from Barque's great mouth--amid the rolling of that fantastic drum whose every note is the report of a cannon.