The shell cleaves the air at perhaps a thousand yards above us; the voice of its gun covers all as with a pavilion of resonance.  The sound of its travel is sluggish, and one divines a projectile bigger-boweled, more enormous than the others.  We can hear it passing and declining in front with the ponderous and increasing vibration of a train that enters a station under brakes; then, its heavy whine sounds fainter.  We watch the hill opposite. and after several seconds it is covered by a salmon-pink cloud that the wind spreads over one-half of the horizon.  “It’s a 220 mm.”

“One can see them,” declares Volpatte, “those shells, when they come out of the gun.  If you’re in the right line, you can even see them a good long away from the gun.”

Another follows:  “There!  Look, look!  Did you see that one?  You didn’t look quick enough, you missed it.  Get a move on!  Look, another!  Did you see it?”

“I did not see it.”—­“Ass!  Got to be a bedstead for you to see it!  Look, quick, that one, there!  Did you see it, unlucky good-for-nothing?”—­” I saw it; is that all?”

Some have made out a small black object, slender and pointed as a blackbird with folded wings, pricking a wide curve down from the zenith.

“That weighs 240 lb., that one, my old bug,” says Volpatte proudly, “and when that drops on a funk-hole it kills everybody inside it.  Those that aren’t picked off by the explosion are struck dead by the wind of it, or they’re gas-poisoned before they can say ‘ouf!’”

“The 270 mm. shell can be seen very well, too—­talk about a bit of iron—­when the howitzer sends it up—­allez, off you go!”

“And the 155 Rimailho, too; but you can’t see that one because it goes too straight and too far; the more you look for it the more it vanishes before your eyes.”

In a stench of sulphur amid black powder, of burned stuffs and calcined earth which roams in sheets about the country, all the menagerie is let loose and gives battle.  Bellowings, roarings, growlings, strange and savage; feline caterwaulings that fiercely rend your ears and search your belly, or the long-drawn piercing hoot like the siren of a ship in distress.  At times, even, something like shouts cross each other in the air-currents, with curious variation of tone that make the sound human.  The country is bodily lifted in places and falls back again.  From one end of the horizon to the other it seems to us that the earth itself is raging with storm and tempest.

And the greatest guns, far away and still farther, diffuse growls much subdued and smothered, but you know the strength of them by the displacement of air which comes and raps you on the ear.

Now, behold a heavy mass of woolly green which expands and hovers over the bombarded region and draws out in every direction.  This touch of strangely incongruous color in the picture summons attention, and all we encaged prisoners turn our faces towards the hideous outcrop.