Zip-bang!  Zip-bang!  Zshh—­Bang—­Bang.  Bang-Bang!

The piano stopped.  Everybody listened.  The village was still as death.  Suddenly down the street came the rattle of a volley of rifle shots.  Over this sound rose the choked, metallic notes of a bugle-call.  The rifle shots continued.  The ominous popping of machine guns resounded.  The village, recovering from its silence, filled with murmurs.  Bang!  Bang!  Bang I Bang! went some more shells.  The same knowledge took definite shape in our minds.

“An attack!”

The violinist, clutching his instrument, hurried down the stairs followed by all the others, leaving the chords of the uncompleted “Prelude” to hang in the startled air.  Shells were popping everywhere—­crashes of smoke and violence—­in the roads, in the fields, and overhead.  The Germans were trying to isolate the few detachments en repos in the village, and prevent reinforcements coming from Dieulouard or any other place.  To this end all the roads between Pont-a-Mousson and the trenches, and the roads leading directly to the trenches, were being shelled.

“Go at once to Poste C!”

The winding road lay straight ahead, and just at the end of the village street, the Germans had established a tir de barrage.  This meant that a shell was falling at that particular point about once every fifty seconds.  I heard two rafales break there as I was grinding up the machine.  Up the slope of the Montauville hill came several of the other drivers.  Tyler, of New York, a comrade who united remarkable bravery to the kindest of hearts, followed close behind me, also evidently bound for Poste C. German bullets, fired wildly from the ridge of The Wood over the French trenches, sang across the Montauville valley, lodging in the trees of Puvenelle behind us with a vicious tspt; shells broke here and there on the stretch leading to the Quart-en-Reserve, throwing the small rocks of the road surfacing wildly in every direction.  The French batteries to our left were firing at the Germans, the German batteries were firing at the French trenches and the roads, and the machine guns rattled ceaselessly.  I saw the poilus hurrying up the muddy roads of the slope of the Bois-le-Pretre—­vague masses of moving blue on the brown ways.  A storm of shells was breaking round certain points in the road and particularly at the entrance to The Wood.  I wondered what had become of the audience at the concert.  Various sounds, transit of shells, bursting of shells, crashing of near-by cannon, and rat-tat-tat-tat! of mitrailleuses played the treble to a roar formed of echoes and cadences—­the roar of battle.  The Wood of Death (Le Bois de la Mort) was singing again.