“One, two, three, four, five,” said a Captain.  “One should not rise till one has counted five, because all the bits have not fallen.  If it is a big shell, count ten.”

We tiptoed and glanced over the edge of the trench.  Yellow smoke was rising at a distance of about three lawn-tennis courts.

“With some of their big shells,” said the Captain, “you can hear nothing until it is too late, for the reason that the shell travels more quickly than the sound of it.  The sounds reach your ears in inverse order—­if you are alive.”

A moment later a third shell dropped in the same plot of ground.

And even a mile and a half off, at the other end of the communication trench, when the automobiles emerged from their shelter into the view of the captive balloon, the officers feared for the automobiles, and we fled very swiftly.

We had been to the very front of the front, and it was the most cheerful, confident, high-spirited place I had seen in France, or in England either.

III Ruins

When you go into Rheims by the Epernay road, the life of the street seems to be proceeding as usual, except that octroi formalities have been abolished.  Women, some young and beautiful, stare nonchalantly as the car passes.  Children are playing and shrieking in the sunshine; the little cafes and shops keep open door; the baker is busy; middle-aged persons go their ways in meditation upon existence.  It is true there are soldiers; but there are soldiers in every important French town at all seasons of the year in peace-time.  In short, the spectacle is just that ordinarily presented to the poorer exterior thoroughfares leading towards the centre of a city.

And yet, in two minutes, in less than two minutes, you may be in a quarter where no life is left.  This considerable quarter is not seriously damaged—­it is destroyed.  Not many houses, but every house in it will have to be rebuilt from the cellars.  This quarter is desolation.  Large shops, large houses, small shops, and small houses have all been treated alike.  The facade may stand, the roof may have fallen in entirely or only partially, floors may have disappeared altogether or may still be clinging at odd angles to the walls—­the middle of every building is the same:  a vast heap of what once was the material of a home or a business, and what now is foul rubbish.  In many instances the shells have revealed the functioning of the home at its most intimate, and that is seen which none should see.  Indignation rises out of the heart.  Amid stacks of refuse you may distinguish a bath, a magnificent fragment of mirror, a piece of tapestry, a saucepan.  In a funeral shop wreaths still hang on their hooks for sale.  Telephone and telegraph wires depend in a loose tangle from the poles.  The clock of the Protestant church has stopped at a quarter to six.  The shells have been freakish.  In one building a shell harmlessly made a hole in the courtyard large enough to bury every commander of a German army; another shell—­a 210 mm.—­went through an inner wall and opened up the cellars by destroying 150 square feet of ground-floor:  ten people were in the cellars, and none was hurt.  Uninjured signs of cafes and shops, such as “The Good Hope,” “The Success of the Day,” meet your gaze with sardonic calm.