“Whenever you say, Senator Lacour, we will begin,” said the Commandant, reaching the topmost notch of his courtesy.  “Are you ready?”

Desnoyers smiled slightly.  For what was his illustrious friend to make himself ready?  What difference could it possibly make to a mere spectator, much interested in the novelty of the show? . . .

There sounded behind them numberless bells, gongs that called and gongs that answered.  The acoustic tubes seemed to swell out with the gallop of words.  The electric wire filled the silence of the room with the palpitations of its mysterious life.  The bland Chief was no longer occupied with his guests.  They conjectured that he was behind them, his mouth at the telephone, conversing with various officials some distance off.  Yet the urbane and well-spoken hero was not abandoning for one moment his candied courtesy.

“Will you be kind enough to tell me when you are ready to begin?” they heard him saying to a distant officer.  “I shall be much pleased to transmit the order.”

Don Marcelo felt a slight nervous tremor near one of his legs; it was Lecour, on the qui vive over the approaching novelty.  They were going to begin firing; something was going to happen that he had never seen before.  The cannons were above their heads; the roughly vaulted roof was going to tremble like the deck of a ship when they shot over it.  The room with its acoustic tubes and its vibrations from the telephones was like the bridge of a vessel at the moment of clearing for action.  The noise that it was going to make! . . .  A few seconds flitted by that to them seemed unusually long . . . and then suddenly a sound like a distant peal of thunder which appeared to come from the clouds.  Desnoyers no longer felt the nervous twitter against his knee.  The senator seemed surprised; his expression seemed to say, “And is that all?” . . .  The heaps of earth above them had deadened the report, so that the discharge of the great machine seemed no more than the blow of a club upon a mattress.  Far more impressive was the scream of the projectile sounding at a great height but displacing the air with such violence that its waves reached even to the window.

It went flying . . . flying, its roar lessening.  Some time passed before they noticed its effects, and the two friends began to believe that it must have been lost in space.  “It will not strike . . . it will not strike,” they were thinking.  Suddenly there surged up on the horizon, exactly in the spot indicated over the blur of the woods, a tremendous column of smoke, a whirling tower of black vapor followed by a volcanic explosion.

“How dreadful it must be to be there!” said the senator.

He and Desnoyers were experiencing a sensation of animal joy, a selfish hilarity in seeing themselves in such a safe place several yards underground.

“The Germans are going to reply at any moment,” said Don Marcelo to his friend.