"How I hate its damned light"
But the moon, cold and smiling, looked down upon the world at war and
into this old city of Amiens, in which bombs were bursting. Women were
running close to the walls. Groups of soldiers made a dash from one
doorway to another. Horses galloped with heavy wagons up the Street of
the Three Pebbles, while shrapnel flickered in the sky above them and
paving-stones were hurled up in bursts of red fire and explosions.
Many horses were killed by flying chunks of steel. They lay bleeding
monstrously so that there were large pools of blood around them.
An officer came into the side door of the Hotel du Rhin. He was white
under his steel hat, which he pushed back while he wiped his forehead.
"A fellow was killed just by my side." he said. "We were standing in a
doorway together and something caught him in the face. He fell like a
log, without a sound, as dead as a door-nail."
There was a flight of midges in the sky, droning with that double note
which vibrated like 'cello strings, very loudly, and with that
sinister noise I could see them quite clearly now and then as they
passed across the face of the moon, black, flitting things, with a
glitter of shrapnel below them.
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