The first night passed under this stress and pressure.  The morning found us face to face with labours still vast, but classified, divided, and half determined.

A superior officer came to visit us.  He seemed anxious.

“They have spotted you,” he said.  “I hope you mayn’t have to work upon each other.  You will certainly be bombarded at noon.”

We had forgotten this prophecy by the time it was fulfilled.

About noon, the air was rent by a screeching whistle, and some dozen shells fell within the hospital enclosure, piercing one of the buildings, but sparing the men.  This was the beginning of an irregular but almost continuous bombardment, which was not specially directed against us, no doubt, but which threatened us incessantly.

No cellars.  Nothing but thin walls.  The work went on.

On the third day a lull enabled us to complete our organisation.  The enemy was bombarding the town and the lines persistently.  Our artillery replied, shell for shell, in furious salvos; a sort of thunderous wall rose around us which seemed to us like a rampart. ...  The afflux of wounded had diminished.  We had just received men who had been fighting in the open country, as in the first days of the war, but under a hail of projectiles hitherto reserved for the destruction of fortresses.  Our comrade D——­arrived from the battlefield on foot, livid, supporting his shattered elbow.  He stammered out a tragic story:  his regiment had held its ground under a surging tide of fire; thousands of huge shells had fallen in a narrow ravine, and he had seen limbs hanging in the thicket, a savage dispersal of human bodies.  The men had held their ground, and then had fought. ...

A quarter of an hour after his arrival D——­, refreshed and strengthened, was contemplating the big wound in his arm on the operating table, and talking calmly of his ruined future. ...

Towards the evening of this day, we were able to go out of the building, and breathe the unpolluted air for a few minutes.

The noise reigned supreme, as silence reigns elsewhere.  We were impregnated, almost intoxicated with it....

A dozen of those captive balloons which the soldiers call “sausages” formed an aerial semi-circle and kept watch.

On the other side of the hills the German balloons also watched in the purple mist to the East.

Night came, and the balloons remained faithfully at their posts.  We were in the centre of a circus of fire, woven by all the lightnings of the cannonade.  To the south-west, however, a black breach opened, and one divined a free passage there towards the interior of the country and towards silence.  A few hundred feet from us, a cross-road continually shelled by the enemy echoed to the shock of projectiles battering the ground like hammers on an anvil.  We often found at our feet fragments of steel still hot, which in the gloom seemed slightly phosphorescent.