Thursday--no shells.

Friday, twelve at intervals between 10.16 and 12.20. Solitary big shell
at 1.05. Another big shell at 3. Some fifteen stray shells between 5 and
midnight.

Saturday--no shells.

Sunday--About five shells an hour between 4 in the afternoon and
midnight.

I give the number of shells falling at this corner as a concrete
instance of what was happening at a dozen other points along the road.
The fire of the German batteries was as capricious as the play of a
search-light; one week, the corner and three or four other points would
catch it, the next week the corner and another set of localities. And
there were periods, sometimes ten days to two weeks long, when hardly a
shell was fired at any road. Then, after a certain sense of security had
begun to take form, a rafale would come screaming over, blow a horse and
wagon to pieces, and leave one or two blue figures huddled in the mud.
But the French replied to each shell and every rafale, in addition to
firing at random all the day and a good deal of the night. There was
hardly a night that Wisteria Villa did not rock to the sound of French
guns fired at 2 and 3 in the morning. But the average day at
Pont-à-Mousson was a day of random silences. The war had all the
capricious-ness of the sea--of uncertain weather. There were hours of
calm in the day, during which the desolate silence of the front flooded
swiftly over the landscape; there were interruptions of great violence,
sometimes desultory, sometimes beginning, in obedience to a human will,
at a certain hour. The outbreak would commence with the orderliness of a