From here, the inhabitants of the ridge seem like
invisible players, lined up for a game with a ball.
"In the Argonne," says Lamuse, "my brother says in a letter that
they get turtle-doves, as he calls them. They're big heavy things,
fired off very close. They come in cooing, really they do, he says,
and when they break wind they don't half make a shindy, he says."
"There's nothing worse than the mortar-toad, that seems to chase
after you and jump over the top of you, and it bursts in the very
trench, just scraping over the bank."
"Tiens, tiens, did you hear it?" A whistling was approaching us when
suddenly it ceased. The contrivance has not burst. "It's a shell
that cried off," Paradis asserts. And we strain our ears for the
satisfaction of hearing--or of not hearing--others.
Lamuse says: "All the fields and the roads and the villages about
here, they're covered with dud shells of all sizes--ours as well, to
say truth. The ground must be full of 'em, that you can't see. I
wonder how they'll go on, later, when the time comes to say, 'That's
enough of it, let's start work again.'"
And all the time, in a monotony of madness, the avalanche of fire
and iron goes on; shrapnel with its whistling explosion and its
overcharged heart of furious metal and the great percussion shells,
whose thunder is that of the railway engine which crashes suddenly
into a wall, the thunder of loaded rails or steel beams, toppling
down a declivity.
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