Behind the battery, the air was racking in furious waves.  With every shot, Lacour and his companion received a blow on the breast, the violent contact with an invisible hand, pushing them backward and forward.  They had to adjust their breathing to the rhythm of the concussions.  During the hundredth part of a second, between the passing of one aerial wave and the advance of the next, their chests felt the agony of vacuum.  Desnoyers admired the baying of those gray dogs.  He knew well their bite, extending across many kilometres.  Now they were fresh and at home in their own kennels.

To Lacour it seemed as though the rows of cannon were chanting a measure, monotonous and fiercely impassioned that must be the martial hymn of the humanity of prehistoric times.  This music of dry, deafening, delirious notes was awakening in the two what is sleeping in the depths of every soul—­the savagery of a remote ancestry.  The air was hot with acrid odors, pungent and brutishly intoxicating.  The perfumes from the explosions were penetrating to the brain through the mouth, the eyes and the ears.

They began to be infected with the same ardor as the directors, shouting and swinging their arms in the midst of the thundering.  The empty capsules were mounting up in thick layers behind the cannon.  Fire! . . . always, fire!

“We must sprinkle them well,” yelled the chiefs.  “We must give a good soaking to the groves where the Boches are hidden.”

So the mouths of ’75 rained without interruption, inundating the remote thickets with their shells.

Inflamed by this deadly activity, frenzied by the destructive celerity, dominated by the dizzying sway of the ruby leaves, Lacour and Desnoyers found themselves waving their hats, leaping from one side to another as though they were dancing the sacred dance of death, and shouting with mouths dry from the acrid vapor of the powder. . . .  “Hurrah! . . .  Hurrah!”

The automobile rode all the afternoon long, stopping only when it met long files of convoys.  It traversed uncultivated fields with skeletons of dwellings, and ran through burned towns which were no more than a succession of blackened facades.

“Now it is your turn,” said the senator to Desnoyers.  “We are going to see your son.”

At nightfall, they ran across groups of infantry, soldiers with long beards and blue uniforms discolored by the inclemency of the weather.  They were returning from the intrenchments, carrying over the hump of their knapsacks, spades, picks and other implements for removing the ground, that had acquired the importance of arms of combat.  They were covered with mud from head to foot.  All looked old in full youth.  Their joy at returning to the cantonment after a week in the trenches, made them fill the silence of the plain with songs in time to the tramp of their nailed boots.  Through the violet twilight drifted the winged strophes of the Marseillaise, or the heroic affirmations of the Chant du Depart.