So far as I personally was concerned this last bit of advice was unnecessary—­my mouth was open already.  Four men trotted to a magazine that was in an earthen kennel and came back bearing a wheelless sheet-metal barrow on which rested a three-foot-long brass shell, very trim and slim and handsome and shiny like gold.  It was an expensive-looking shell and quite ornate.  At the tail of Number One the bearers heaved the barrow up shoulder-high, at the same time tilting it forward.  Then a round vent opened magically and the cyclops sucked the morsel forward into its gullet, thus reversing the natural swallowing process, and smacked its steel lip behind it with a loud and greasy snuck!  A glutton of a gun—­you could tell that from the sound it made.

A lieutenant snapped out something, a sergeant snapped it back to him, the gun crew jumped aside, balancing themselves on tiptoe with their mouths all agape, and the gun-firer either pulled a lever out or else pushed one home, I couldn’t tell which.  Then everything—­sky and woods and field and all—­fused and ran together in a great spatter of red flame and white smoke, and the earth beneath our feet shivered and shook as the twenty-one-centimeter spat out its twenty-one-centimeter mouthful.  A vast obscenity of sound beat upon us, making us reel backward, and for just the one-thousandth part of a second I saw a round white spot, like a new baseball, against a cloud background.  The poplars, which had bent forward as if before a quick wind-squall, stood up, trembling in their tops, and we dared to breathe again.  Then each in its turn the other four guns spoke, profaning the welkin, and we rocked on our heels like drunken men, and I remember there was a queer taste, as of something burned, in my mouth.  All of which was very fine, no doubt, and very inspiring, too, if one cared deeply for that sort of thing; but to myself, when the hemisphere had ceased from its quiverings, I said: 

“It isn’t true—­this isn’t war; it’s just a costly, useless game of playing at war.  Behold, now, these guns did not fire at anybody visible or anything tangible.  They merely elevated their muzzles into the sky and fired into the sky to make a great tumult and spoil the good air with a bad-tasting smoke.  No enemy is in sight and no enemy will answer back; therefore no enemy exists.  It is all a useless and a fussy business, signifying nothing.”

Nor did any enemy answer back.  The guns having been fired with due pomp and circumstance, the gunners went back to those pipe-smoking and postcard-writing pursuits of theirs and everything was as before—­ peaceful and entirely serene.  Only the telephone man remained in his bed in the straw with his ear at his telephone.  He was still couched there, spraddling ridiculously on his stomach, with his legs outstretched in a sawbuck pattern, as we came away.

“It isn’t always quite so quiet hereabouts,” said the lieutenant.  “The commander of this battery tells me that yesterday the French dropped some shrapnel among his guns and killed a man or two.  Perhaps things will be brisker at the ten-centimeter-gun battery.”  He spoke as one who regretted that the show which he offered was not more exciting.