Another of the voices of the night is the whine the shell makes in coming; it is not unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it’s dark in Africa:  ``How nice traveller would taste,’’ the hyena seems to say, and ``I want dead White Man.’’ It is the rising note of the shell as it comes nearer, and its dying away when it has gone over, that make it reminiscent of the hyena’s method of diction.  If it is not going over then it has something quite different to say.  It begins the same as the other, it comes up, talking of the back areas with the same long whine as the other.  I have heard old hands say ``That one is going well over.’’ ``Whee-oo,’’ says the shell; but just where the ``oo’’ should be long drawn out and turn into the hyena’s final syllable, it says something quite different. ``Zarp,’’ it says.  That is bad.  Those are the shells that are looking for you.

And then of course there is the whizz-bang coming from close, along his flat trajectory:  he has little to say, but comes like a sudden wind, and all that he has to do is done and over at once.

And then there is the gas shell, who goes over gurgling gluttonously, probably in big herds, putting down a barrage.  It is the liquid inside that gurgles before it is turned to gas by the mild explosion; that is the explanation of it; yet that does not prevent one picturing a tribe of cannibals who have winded some nice juicy men and are smacking their chops and dribbling in anticipation.

And a wonderful thing to see, even in those wonderful nights, is our thermite bursting over the heads of the Germans.  The shell breaks into a shower of golden rain; one cannot judge easily at night how high from the ground it breaks, but about as high as the tops of trees seen at a hundred yards.  It spreads out evenly all round and rains down slowly; it is a bad shower to be out in, and for a long time after it has fallen, the sodden grass of winter, and the mud and old bones beneath it, burn quietly in a circle.  On such a night as this, and in such showers, the flying pigs will go over, which take two men to carry each of them; they go over and root right down to the German dugout, where the German has come in out of the golden rain, and they fling it all up in the air.

These are such nights as Scheherazade with all her versatility never dreamed of; or if such nightmares came she certainly never told of them, or her august master, the Sultan, light of the age, would have had her at once beheaded; and his people would have deemed that he did well.  It has been reserved for a modern autocrat to dream such a nightmare, driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-whiskered Scheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel Canal; and being an autocrat he has made the nightmare a reality for the world.  But the nightmare is stronger than its master, and grows mightier every night; and the All-Highest War Lord learns that there are powers in Hell that are easily summoned by the rulers of earth, but that go not easily home.