officer. "Their trenches are------. You can see for
yourself."

The guns in the woods began again. They seemed to have no
relation to the regularly spaced bursts of smoke along a
little smear in the desert earth two thousand yards away--no
connection at all with the strong voices overhead coming and
going. It was as impersonal as the drive of the sea along a
breakwater.

Thus it went: a pause--a gathering of sound like the race of
an incoming wave; then the high-flung heads of breakers
spouting white up the face of a groyne. Suddenly, a seventh
wave broke and spread the shape of its foam like a plume
overtopping all the others.

"That's one of our torpilleurs--what you call
trench-sweepers," said the observer among the whispering leaves.

Some one crossed the platform to consult the map with its
ranges. A blistering outbreak of white smokes rose a little
beyond the large plume. It was as though the tide had struck
a reef out yonder.

Then a new voice of tremendous volume lifted itself out of a
lull that followed. Somebody laughed. Evidently the voice
was known.

"That is not for us," a gunner said. "They are being waked up
from------" he named a distant French position. "So and so is