The abri to which we retired was about twenty-five feet long and eight feet wide, and had a door at either end.  The hut had been dug right in the crude, calcareous rock of Lorraine, and the beams of the roof were deeply set into these natural walls.  Along the front wall ran a corridor about a foot wide, and between this corridor and the rear wall was a raised platform about seven feet wide piled with hay.  Sprawled in this hay, in various attitudes, were about fifteen men, the squad that had just completed its sentry service.  Two candles hung from the massive roof and flickered in the draughts between the two doors, revealing, in rare periods of radiance, a shelf along the wall over the sleepers’ heads piled with canteens, knapsacks, and helmets.  In the middle of the rock wall by the corridor a semicircular funnel had been carved out to serve as a fireplace, and at its base a flameless fire of beautiful, crumbling red brands was glowing.  This hearth cut in the living rock was very wonderful and beautiful.  Suddenly a trench shell landed right on the roof of the abri, shaking little fragments of stone down into the fire on the hearth.  The soldiers, who sat hunched up on the edge of the platform, their feet in the corridor, gave vent to a burst of anger that had its source in exasperation.

“This is going too far.”—­“Why don’t they answer?”—­“Are those dirty cows (the classic sales vaches) going to keep this up all afternoon?”

“Really, now, this is getting to be a real nuisance.”  Suddenly two forms loomed large in the left doorway, and the stolid sentry of whom I have spoken limped in on the arm of an infirmier.  Voices murmured in the obscurity, “Who is wounded?”—­“Somebody wounded?” And dreamy-eyed ones sat up in the straw.  The stolid one—­he could not have been much over twenty-one or two—­sat down on the edge of the straw near the fireplace, his face showing no emotion, only a pallor.  He had a painful but not serious wound; a small fragment of iron, from a shell that had fallen directly into the trench, had lodged in the bones of his foot.  He took off his big, ugly shoe and rested the blood-stained sock on the straw.  Voices like echoes traveled the length of the shelter—­“Is it thou, Jarnac?”—­“Art thou wounded, Jarnac?” “Yes,” answered the big fellow in a bass whisper.  He was a peasant of the Woevre, one of a stolid, laborious race.

“The lieutenant has gone to the telephone shelter to ring up the batteries,” said the infirmier.  “Good,” said a vibrant, masculine voice somewhere in the straw.

A shell coming toward you from the enemy makes a good deal of noise, but it is not to be compared to the noise made by one’s own shells rushing on a slant just over one’s head to break in the enemy’s trenches seventy-five feet away.  A swift rafale of some fifty “seventy-five” shells passed whistling like the great wind of the Apocalypse, which is to blow when the firmament collapses.  Looking through the rifle slit, after the rafale was over, I could see puffs of smoke apparently rising out of the carpet of dead leaves.  The nervous man, the other sentry, held up his finger for us not to make the slightest noise and whispered,—­