very wonderful and beautiful. Suddenly a trench shell landed right on
the roof of the abri, shaking little fragments of stone down into the
fire on the hearth. The soldiers, who sat hunched up on the edge of the
platform, their feet in the corridor, gave vent to a burst of anger that
had its source in exasperation.

"This is going too far."--"Why don't they answer?"--"Are those dirty
cows (the classic sales vaches) going to keep this up all afternoon?"

"Really, now, this is getting to be a real nuisance." Suddenly two forms
loomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom I have
spoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier. Voices murmured in the
obscurity, "Who is wounded?"--"Somebody wounded?" And dreamy-eyed ones
sat up in the straw. The stolid one--he could not have been much over
twenty-one or two--sat down on the edge of the straw near the fireplace,
his face showing no emotion, only a pallor. He had a painful but not
serious wound; a small fragment of iron, from a shell that had fallen
directly into the trench, had lodged in the bones of his foot. He took
off his big, ugly shoe and rested the blood-stained sock on the straw.
Voices like echoes traveled the length of the shelter--"Is it thou,
Jarnac?"--"Art thou wounded, Jarnac?" "Yes," answered the big fellow in
a bass whisper. He was a peasant of the Woevre, one of a stolid,
laborious race.

"The lieutenant has gone to the telephone shelter to ring up the
batteries," said the infirmier. "Good," said a vibrant, masculine voice
somewhere in the straw.

A shell coming toward you from the enemy makes a good deal of noise, but
it is not to be compared to the noise made by one's own shells rushing