We could hear something else too: the evening benediction had started.
Now fast, now slow, like the beating of a feverish pulse, the guns
sounded in faint throbs; and all along the horizon from southeast to
southwest, and back again, ran flares and waves of a sullen red
radiance. The light flamed high at one instant--like fireworks--and at
the next it died almost to a glow, as though a great bed of peat coals
or a vast limekiln lay on the farthermost crest of the next chain of
hills. It was the first time I had ever seen artillery fire at night,
though I had heard it often enough by then in France and in Belgium, and
even in Germany; for when the wind blew out of the west we could hear in
Aix-la-Chapelle the faint booming of the great cannons before Antwerp,
days and nights on end.

I do not know how long I stood and looked and listened. Eventually I
was aware that the courteous Von Scheller, standing at my elbow, was
repeating something he had already stated at least once.

"Those brighter flashes you see, apparently coming from below the other
lights, are our guns," he was saying. "They seem to be below the others
because they are nearer to us. Personally I don't think these evening
volleys do very much damage," he went on as though vaguely regretful
that the dole of death by night should be so scanty, "because it is
impossible for the men in the outermost observation pits to see the
effect of the shots; but we answer, as you notice, just to show the
French and English we are not asleep."

Those iron vespers lasted, I should say, for the better part of an hour.
When they were ended we went indoors. Everybody was assembled in the
long hall of the Prefecture, and a young officer was smashing out