if some one had emptied a hodful of coal onto the house-roof from the
height of the clouds. Another silence followed. Suddenly it was broken
by a swift, complete sound, a heavy boom-roar, and on the heels of this
noise came a throbbing, whistling sigh that, at first faint as the sound
of ocean on a distant beach, increased with incredible speed to a
whistling swish, ending in a HISH of tremendous volume and a roaring,
grinding burst. The sound of a great shell is never a pure bang; one
hears, rather, the end of the arriving HISH, the explosion, and the
tearing disintegration of the thick wall of iron in one grinding
hammer-blow of terrific violence. On the heels of this second shell came
voices in the dark street, and the rosy glow of fire from somewhere
behind. More lumps, fragments of shell that had been shot into the air
by the explosion, rained down upon the roof. I got up and went to the
kitchen window. A house on one of the silent streets between the city
and the lines was on fire, great volumes of smoke were rolling off into
the starlit night, and voices were heard all about murmuring in the
shadows. I hurried on my clothes and went down to the cellar.

The light of two candles hanging from a shelf in loops of wire revealed
a clean, high cellar; a mess of straw was strewn along one wall, and a
stack of shovels and picks, some of them wrapped in paper, was banked
against the other. In the straw lay three oldish men, fully clad in the
dark-blue uniform which in old times had signaled the Engineer Corps;
one dozed with his head on his arm, the other two were stretched out
flat in the mysterious grossness of sleep. A door from the cellar to a
sunken garden was open, and through this opening streamed the intense
radiance of the rising fire. At the opening stood three men, my visitor
of the evening, a little, wrinkled man with Napoleon III whiskers and
imperial, and an old, dwarfish fellow with a short neck, a bullet head,
and close-clipped hair. Catching sight of me, the Burgundian said:--