men, starting at the rear, out of danger, might move to the very front
of the fighting zone and all the time be well sheltered. So far as I
could make out there were but few breaks in the sequence of
communications. One of these breaks was almost directly in front of me
as I stood facing the south.

The batteries of the Allies and their infantry trenches, being so much
farther away, were less plainly visible. I could discern their location
without being able to grasp their general arrangement. Between the
nearer infantry trenches of the two opposing forces were tiny dots in
the ground, each defined by an infinitesimal hillock of yellow earth
heaped before it--observation pits these, where certain picked men, who
do not expect to live very long anyway, hide themselves away to keep
tally on the effect of the shells, which go singing past just over their
heads to fall among the enemy, who may be only a few hundred feet or a
few hundred yards away from the observers.

It was an excessively busy afternoon among the guns. They spoke
continually--now this battery going, now that; now two or three or a
dozen together--and the sound of them came up to us in claps and roars
like summer thunder. Sometimes, when a battery close by let go, I could
watch the thin, shreddy trail of fine smoke that marked the arched
flight of a shrapnel bomb, almost from the very mouth of the gun clear
to where it burst out into a fluffy white powder puff inside the enemy's
position.

Contrariwise, I could see how shells from the enemy crossed those shells
in the air and curved downward to scatter their iron sprays among the
Germans. In the midst of all this would come a sharp, spattering sound,
as though hail in the height of the thunder shower had fallen on a tin