by an enemy’s batteries which belch out bursting shells with frightful precision and regularity?  What is the most courageous man to do in such an hour?  Can he stand erect and fearless under a sky which is raining down jagged pieces of steel?  Can he adopt the pose of an Adelphi hero, with a scornful smile on his lips, when a yard away from him a hole large enough to bury a taxicab is torn out of the earth, and when the building against which he has been standing is suddenly knocked into a ridiculous ruin?

It is impossible to exaggerate the monstrous horror of the shell-fire, as I knew when I stood in the midst of it, watching its effect upon the men around me, and analysing my own psychological sensations with a morbid interest.  I was very much afraid—­day after day I faced that musis and hated it—­but there were all sorts of other sensations besides fear which worked a change in me.  I was conscious of great physical discomfort which reacted upon my brain.  The noises were even more distressing to me than the risk of death.  It was terrifying in its tumult.  The German batteries were hard at work round Nieuport, Dixmude, Pervyse, and other towns and villages, forming a crescent, with its left curve sweeping away from the coast.  One could see the stabbing flashes from some of the enemy’s guns and a loud and unceasing roar came from them with regular rolls of thunderous noise interrupted by sudden and terrific shocks, which shattered into one’s brain and shook one’s body with a kind of disintegrating tumult.  High above this deep-toned concussion came the cry of the shells—­that long carrying buzz—­like a monstrous, angry bee rushing away from a burning hive—­which rises into a shrill singing note before ending and bursting into the final boom which scatters death.

But more awful was the noise of our own guns.  At Nieuport I stood only a few hundred yards away from the warships lying off the coast.  Each shell which they sent across the dunes was like one of Jove’s thunderbolts, and made one’s body and soul quake with the agony of its noise.  The vibration was so great that it made my skull ache as though it had been hammered.  Long afterwards I found myself trembling with those waves of vibrating sounds.  Worse still, because sharper and more piercingly staccato, was my experience close to a battery of French cent-vingt.  Each shell was fired with a hard metallic crack, which seemed to knock a hole into my ear-drums.  I suffered intolerably from the noise, yet—­so easy it is to laugh in the midst of pain—–­I laughed aloud when a friend of mine, passing the battery in his motor-car, raised his hand to one of the gunners, and said, “Un moment, s’il vous plait!” It was like asking Jove to stop his thunderbolts.