When the aëroplanes are home and the sunset has flared away, and it is
cold, and night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than
you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not
know which it is.
It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came
out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills. It is as
though they picked up the tops of the hills in their hands and then
let them drop rather slowly. It is exactly like hills falling. You see
the flashes all along the sky, and then that lumping thump as though
the top of the hill had been let drop, not all in one piece, but
crumbled a little as it would drop from your hands if you were three
hundred feet high and were fooling about in the night, spoiling what
it had taken so long to make. That is heavy stuff bursting, a little
way off.
If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting, you can hear in it
a curious metallic ring. That applies to the shells of either side,
provided that you are near enough, though usually of course it is the
hostile shell and not your own that you are nearest to, and so one
distinguishes them. It is curious, after such a colossal event as this
explosion must be in the life of a bar of steel, that anything should
remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the metal, but it appears
to, if you listen attentively; it is perhaps its last remonstrance
before leaving its shape and going back to rust in the earth again for
ages.
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.