Lacour was about to take up the thread of his discourse about his glorious forefather in the convention when something interfered.

“They are firing,” said the man at the telephone simply.

The two officers repeated to the senator this news from the watch tower.  Had he not said that the enemy was going to fire? . . .  Obeying a sane instinct of preservation, and pushed at the same time by his son, he found himself in the refuge of the battery.  He certainly did not wish to hide himself in this cave, so he remained near the entrance, with a curiosity which got the best of his disquietude.

He felt the approach of the invisible projectile, in spite of the roar of the neighboring cannon.  He perceived with rare sensibility its passage through the air, above the other closer and more powerful sounds.  It was a squealing howl that was swelling in intensity, that was opening out as it advanced, filling all space.  Soon it ceased to be a shriek, becoming a rude roar formed by divers collisions and frictions, like the descent of an electric tram through a hillside road, or the course of a train which passes through a station without stopping.

He saw it approach in the form of a cloud, bulging as though it were going to explode over the battery.  Without knowing just how it happened, the senator suddenly found himself in the bottom of the shelter, his hands in cold contact with a heap of steel cylinders lined up like bottles.  They were projectiles.

“If a German shell,” he thought, “should explode above this burrow . . . what a frightful blowing up!” . . .

But he calmed himself by reflecting on the solidity of the arched vault with its beams and sacks of earth several yards thick.  Suddenly he was in absolute darkness.  Another had sought refuge in the shelter, obstructing the light with his body; perhaps his friend Desnoyers.

A year passed by while his watch was registering a single second, then a century at the same rate . . . and finally the awaited thunder burst forth, making the refuge vibrate, but with a kind of dull elasticity, as though it were made of rubber.  In spite of its thud, the explosion wrought horrible damage.  Other minor explosions, playful and whistling, followed behind the first.  In his imagination, Lacour saw the cataclysm—­a writhing serpent, vomiting sparks and smoke, a species of Wagnerian monster that upon striking the ground was disgorging thousands of fiery little snakes, that were covering the earth with their deadly contortions. . . .  The shell must have burst nearby, perhaps in the very square occupied by this battery.

He came out of the shelter, expecting to encounter a sickening display of dismembered bodies, and he saw his son smiling, smoking a cigar and talking with Desnoyers. . . .  That was a mere nothing!  The gunners were tranquilly finishing the charging of a huge piece.  They had raised their eyes for a moment as the enemy’s shell went screaming by, and then had continued their work.