“Gas, probably.  Let’s have our masks ready.”—­“The hogs!”

“They’re unfair tricks, those,” says Farfadet.

“They’re what?” asks Barque jeeringly.

“Why, yes, they’re dirty dodges, those gases—­”

“You make me tired,” retorts Barque, “with your fair ways and your unfair ways.  When you’ve seen men squashed, cut in two, or divided from top to bottom, blown into showers by an ordinary shell, bellies turned inside out and scattered anyhow, skulls forced bodily into the chest as if by a blow with a club, and in place of the head a bit of neck, oozing currant jam of brains all over the chest and back—­you’ve seen that and yet you can say ‘There are clean ways!’”

“Doesn’t alter the fact that the shell is allowed, it’s recognized—­”

“Ah, la, la!  I’ll tell you what—­you make me blubber just as much as you make me laugh!” And he turns his back.

“Hey, look out, boys!”

We strain our eyes, and one of us has thrown himself flat on the ground; others look instinctively and frowning towards the shelter that we have not time to reach. and during these two seconds each one bends his head.  It is a grating noise as of huge scissors which comes near and nearer to us, and ends at last with a ringing crash of unloaded iron.

That ore fell not far from us—­two hundred yards away, perhaps.  We crouch in the bottom of the trench and remain doubled up while the place where we are is lashed by a shower of little fragments.

“Don’t want this in my tummy, even from that distance,” says Paradis, extracting from the earth of the trench wall a morsel that has just lodged there.  It is like a bit of coke, bristling with edged and pointed facets, and he dances it in his hand so as not to burn himself.

There is a hissing noise.  Paradis sharply bows his head and we follow suit.  “The fuse!—­it has gone over.”  The shrapnel fuse goes up and then comes down vertically; but that of the percussion shell detaches itself from the broken mass after the explosion and usually abides buried at the point of contact, but at other times it flies off at random like a big red-hot pebble.  One must beware of it.  It may hurl itself on you a very long time after the detonation and by incredible paths, passing over the embankment and plunging into the cavities.

“Nothing so piggish as a fuse.  It happened to me once—­”

“There’s worse things,” broke in Bags of the 11th, “The Austrian shells, the 130’s and the 74’s.  I’m afraid of them.  They’re nickel-plated, they say, but what I do know, seeing I’ve been there, is they come so quick you can’t do anything to dodge them.  You no sooner hear em snoring than they burst on you.

“The German 105’s, neither, you haven’t hardly the time to flatten yourself.  I once got the gunners to tell me all about them.”

“I tell you, the shells from the naval guns, you haven’t the time to hear ’em.  Got to pack yourself up before they come.”