"I'm going to shut my eyes," said one, "it's easier like that."
"My God," exclaimed another, "I can't move my legs an inch!"
"Fear," said the doctor, "shows itself in hereditary reflexes. Man, when in danger, seeks the pack, and fright makes
his flesh creep, because his furred ancestors bristled all over when in combat, in order to appear enormous and terrible."
A terrific explosion shook the hill, and flames arose over the town.
"They're aiming at the station," said the colonel. "Those searchlights do more harm than good. They simply frame the target and show it up."
"When I was at Havre," Aurelle remarked, "a gunner went to ask the Engineers for some searchlights that were rotting away in some store or other. 'Quite impossible,' said the engineer; 'they're the war reserve; we're forbidden to touch them.' He could never be brought to understand that the war we were carrying on over here was the one that was specified in his schedule."
The great panting and throbbing of an aeroplane was coming nearer, and the whole sky was quivering with the noise of machinery like a huge factory.
"My God," exclaimed the doctor, "we're in for it this time!"
But the stars twinkled gently on, and above the din they heard the clear, delicate notes of a bird's song—just as though the throbbing motors, the whizzing shells and the frightened wailing of the women were nothing but the harmonies devised by the divine composer of some military-pastoral symphony to sustain the slender melody of a bird.