June 22nd.

My first waking thought was:  “How time flies!  It must be the Fourteenth of July!” I knew it could not be the Fourth of that specially commemorative month, because I was just awake enough to be sure I was not in America; and the only other event to justify such a terrific clatter was the French national anniversary.  I sat up and listened to the popping of guns till a completed sense of reality stole over me, and I realized that I was in the inn of the Wild Man at Cassel, and that it was not the fourteenth of July but the twenty-second of June.

Then, what—?  A Taube, of course!  And all the guns in the place were cracking at it!  By the time this mental process was complete, I had scrambled up and hurried downstairs and, unbolting the heavy doors, had rushed out into the square.  It was about four in the morning, the heavenliest moment of a summer dawn, and in spite of the tumult Cassel still apparently slept.  Only a few soldiers stood in the square, looking up at a drift of white cloud behind which—­they averred—­a Taube had just slipped out of sight.  Cassel was evidently used to Taubes, and I had the sense of having overdone my excitement and not being exactly in tune; so after gazing a moment at the white cloud I slunk back into the hotel, barred the door and mounted to my room.  At a window on the stairs I paused to look out over the sloping roofs of the town, the gardens, the plain; and suddenly there was another crash and a drift of white smoke blew up from the fruit-trees just under the window.  It was a last shot at the fugitive, from a gun hidden in one of those quiet provincial gardens between the houses; and its secret presence there was more startling than all the clatter of mitrailleuses from the rock.

Silence and sleep came down again on Cassel; but an hour or two later the hush was broken by a roar like the last trump.  This time it was no question of mitrailleuses.  The Wild Man rocked on its base, and every pane in my windows beat a tattoo.  What was that incredible unimagined sound?  Why, it could be nothing, of course, but the voice of the big siege-gun of Dixmude!  Five times, while I was dressing, the thunder shook my windows, and the air was filled with a noise that may be compared—­if the human imagination can stand the strain—­to the simultaneous closing of all the iron shop-shutters in the world.  The odd part was that, as far as the Wild Man and its inhabitants were concerned, no visible effects resulted, and dressing, packing and coffee-drinking went on comfortably in the strange parentheses between the roars.

We set off early for a neighbouring Head-quarters, and it was not till we turned out of the gates of Cassel that we came on signs of the bombardment:  the smashing of a gas-house and the converting of a cabbage-field into a crater which, for some time to come, will spare photographers the trouble of climbing Vesuvius.  There was a certain consolation in the discrepancy between the noise and the damage done.