A shell burst very near, and a bitter odor of explosives came swirling through the doorway.  A fragment of the shell casing struck a window above us, and a large piece of glass fell by the doorway and broke into splinters.  The first fire was dying down, but two others were burning briskly.  The soldiers waited for the end of the bombardment, as they might have waited for the end of a thunderstorm.

“Tiens—­here comes the shrapnel,” exclaimed the Burgundian.  And he slammed the door swiftly.

A high, clear whistle cleaved the flame-lit sky, and about thirty small shrapnel shells burst beyond us.

“They try to prevent any one putting out the fires,” said the Burgundian confidentially.  “They get the range from the light of the flames.”

Another dreadful rafale (volley) of shrapnel, at the rate of ten or fifteen a minute, came speeding from the German lines.

“They are firing on the other house, now.”

“Who puts out the fires?”

“The territorials who police and clean up the town.  Some of them live two doors below.”

The Burgundian pointed down the garden to a door opening, like our own, on to an area below the level of the street.  Suddenly, a gate opening on a back lane swung back, and two soldiers entered, one carrying the feet and the other the shoulders of a third.  The body hung clumsily between them like a piece of old sacking.

“Tiens—­someone is wounded,” said the Burgundian.  “Go, thou, Badel, and see who it is.”

The dwarf plodded off obediently.

“It is Palester,” he announced on his return, “the type that had the swollen jaw last month.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s been killed.”

Chapter IV

La Foret De Bois-Le-Pretre

Beginning at the right bank of the Meuse, a vast plateau of bare, desolate moorland sweeps eastward to the Moselle, and descends to the river in a number of great, wooded ridges perpendicular to the northward-flowing stream.  The town of Pont-a-Mousson lies an apron of meadowland spread between two of these ridges, the ridge of Puvenelle and the ridge of the Bois-le-Pretre.  The latter is the highest of all the spurs of the valley.  Rising from the river about half a mile to the north of the city, it ascends swiftly to the level of the plateau, and was seen from our headquarters as a long, wooded ridge blocking the sky-line to the northwest.  The hamlet of Maidieres, in which our headquarters were located, lies just at the foot of Puvenelle, at a point where the amphitheater of Pont-a-Mousson, crowding between the two ridges, becomes a steep-walled valley sharply tilted to the west.