cold, and night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than
you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not
know which it is.

It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came
out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills. It is as
though they picked up the tops of the hills in their hands and then
let them drop rather slowly. It is exactly like hills falling. You see
the flashes all along the sky, and then that lumping thump as though
the top of the hill had been let drop, not all in one piece, but
crumbled a little as it would drop from your hands if you were three
hundred feet high and were fooling about in the night, spoiling what
it had taken so long to make. That is heavy stuff bursting, a little
way off.

If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting, you can hear in it
a curious metallic ring. That applies to the shells of either side,
provided that you are near enough, though usually of course it is the
hostile shell and not your own that you are nearest to, and so one
distinguishes them. It is curious, after such a colossal event as this
explosion must be in the life of a bar of steel, that anything should
remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the metal, but it appears
to, if you listen attentively; it is perhaps its last remonstrance
before leaving its shape and going back to rust in the earth again for
ages.

Another of the voices of the night is the whine the shell makes in
coming; it is not unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it's dark
in Africa: ``How nice traveller would taste,'' the hyena seems to say,
and ``I want dead White Man.'' It is the rising note of the shell as