countrymen were helping to make it.  Now the separate reports strung out until you could count perhaps three between reports; now they came so close together that the music they made was a constant roaring which would endure for a minute on a stretch, or half a minute anyhow.  But for all the noticeable heed which any uniformed men in my vicinity paid to this it might as well have been blasting in a distant stone quarry.  This attitude which they maintained, coupled with the fact that seemingly all the firing did no damage whatsoever, only served to strengthen the illusion that after all it was not the actual business of warfare which spread itself beneath our eyes.

Apparently most of the shells from the Allies’ side—­which of course was the far side from us—­rose out of a dip in the contour of the land.  Rising so, they mainly fell among or near the shattered remnants of two hamlets upon the nearer front of a little hill perhaps three miles from our location.  A favorite object of their attack appeared to be a wrecked beet-sugar factory of which one side was blown away.

There would appear just above the horizon line a ball of smoke as black as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high explosives.  Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they told us, would be shrapnel.  The German reply to the enemy’s guns issued from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; and these German shells, so far as we might judge, passed entirely over and beyond the smashed hamlets and the ruined sugar-beet factory and, curving downward, exploded out of our sight.

“The French persist in a belief that we have men in those villages,” said one of the general’s aides to me.  “They are wasting their powder.  There are many men there and some among them are Germans, but they are all dead men.”

He offered to show me some live men, and took me to one of the telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I focused for distance.  Suddenly out of the blur of the lens there sprang up in front of me, seemingly quite close, a zigzagging toy trench cut in the face of a little hillock.  This trench was full of gray figures of the size of very small dolls.  They were moving aimlessly back and forth, it seemed to me, doing nothing at all.

Then I saw another trench that ran slantwise up the hillock and it contained more of the pygmies.  A number of these pygmies came out of their trench—­I could see them quite plainly, clambering up the steep wall of it—­and they moved, very slowly it would seem, toward the crosswise trench on ahead a bit.  To reach it they had to cross a sloping green patch of cleared land.  So far as I might tell no explosive or shrapnel shower fell into them or near them, but when they had gone perhaps a third of the distance across the green patch there was a