The shells from the guns started on their course with characteristic minute-long shrieks.  Watches were pulled out to determine just how long the shrieks could be heard, and the uninitiated were preparing to hear the sound of the explosion itself.  The battery chief explained, however, that this scream was due to the conditions immediately around the muzzle of the gun, and could not be heard from other points.  He invited close watch of the atmosphere a hundred yards before the gun at the next shot.  Not only could the projectile be seen plainly in the beginning of its flight, but the waves of billowing air, rushing back to fill the void left by the discharge and bounding and rebounding in a tempestuous sea of gas, could be distinctly observed.  This airy commotion caused the sound heard for more than a minute.

The Slaughter in Alsace

By John H. Cox of The London Standard.

BASLE, Switzerland, Aug. 19.—­I have just returned from an inspection of the scenes of the recent fighting between the French and Germans in the southern districts of Alsace.

Dispatches from Paris and Berlin describe the engagements between the frontier and Muelhausen as insignificant encounters between advance guards.  If this be true in a military sense, and the preliminaries of the war produce the terrible effects I have witnessed, the disastrous results of the war itself will exceed human comprehension.

As a Swiss subject I was equipped with identification papers and accompanied by four of my countrymen, all on bicycles.

At the very outset the sight of peasants, men and women, unconcernedly at work in the fields gathering the harvest, struck me as strange and unnatural.  The men were either old or well advanced in middle age.  Everywhere women, girls, and mere lads were working.

The first sign of war was the demolished villa of a Catholic priest at a village near Ransbach.  This priest had lived there for many years, engaged in religious work and literary pursuits.  After the outbreak of the war the German authorities jumped at the conclusion that he was an agent of the French Secret Service and that he had been in the habit of sending to Belfort information concerning German military movements and German measures for defense—­very often by means of carrier pigeons.

The Alsatians say that these accusations were utterly unjust; but last week a military party raided the priest’s house, dragged him from his study, placed him against his own garden wall and shot him summarily as a traitor and spy.  The house was searched from top to bottom, and numerous books and papers were removed, after which the building was destroyed by dynamite.  The priest was buried without a coffin at the end of his little garden plot, and some of the villagers placed a rough cross on the mound which marked the place of interment.

In the next large village we were told that it had been successively occupied by French and German troops and had been the scene of stiff infantry fighting.