Buried in our holes up to the chin, our chests heaving against the solid bulk of the ground that protects us, we watch the dazzling and deepening drama develop.  The bombardment is redoubled.  The trees of light on the ridge have melted into hazy parachutes in the pallor of dawn, sickly heads of Medusae with points of fire; then, more sharply defined as the day expands, they become bunches of smoke-feathers, ostrich feathers white and gray, which come suddenly to life on the jumbled and melancholy soil of Hill 119, five or six hundred yards in front of us, and then slowly fade away.  They are truly the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud, circling as one and thundering together.  On the flank of the bill we see a party of men running to earth.  One by one they disappear, swallowed up in the adjoining anthills.

Now, one can better make out the form of our “guests.”  At each shot a tuft of sulphurous white underlined in black forms sixty yards up in the air, unfolds and mottles itself, and we catch in the explosion the whistling of the charge of bullets that the yellow cloud hurls angrily to the ground.  It bursts in sixfold squalls, one after another—­bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.  It is the 77 mm. gun.

We disdain the 77 mm. shrapnel, in spite of the fact that Blesbois was killed by one of them three days ago.  They nearly always burst too high.  Barque explains it to us, although we know it well:  “One’s chamber-pot protects one’s nut well enough against the bullets.  So they can destroy your shoulder and damn well knock you down, but they don’t spread you about.  Naturally, you’ve got to be fly, all the same.  Got to be careful you don’t lift your neb in the air as long as they’re buzzing about, nor put your hand out to see if it’s raining.  Now, our 75 mm.—­”

“There aren’t only the 77’s,” Mesnil Andre broke in, “there’s all damned sorts.  Spell those out for me—­” Those are shrill and cutting whistles, trembling or rattling; and clouds of all shapes gather on the slopes yonder whose vastness shows through them, slopes where our men are in the depths of the dug-outs.  Gigantic plumes of faint fire mingle with huge tassels of steam, tufts that throw out straight filaments, smoky feathers that expand as they fall—­quite white or greenish-gray, black or copper with gleams of gold, or as if blotched with ink.

The two last explosions are quite near.  Above the battered ground they take shape like vast balls of black and tawny dust; and as they deploy and leisurely depart at the wind’s will, having finished their task, they have the outline of fabled dragons.

Our line of faces on the level of the ground turns that way, and we follow them with our eyes from the bottom of the trench in the middle of this country peopled by blazing and ferocious apparitions, these fields that the sky has crushed.

“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.