Eventually I was aware that the courteous Von Scheller, standing at my elbow, was repeating something he had already stated at least once.
"Those brighter flashes you see, apparently coming from below the other lights, are our guns," he was saying.

"They seem to be below the others because they are nearer to us.

Personally I don't think these evening volleys do very much damage," he went on as though vaguely regretful that the dole of death by night should be so scanty, "because it is impossible for the men in the outermost observation pits to see the effect of the shots; but we answer, as you notice, just to show the French and English we are not asleep." Those iron vespers lasted, I should say, for the better part of an hour.
When they were ended we went indoors.

Everybody was assembled in the long hall of the Prefecture, and a young officer was smashing out marching songs on the piano.

The Berlin artist made an art gallery of the billiard table and was exhibiting the water-color sketches he had done that day--all very dashing and spirited in their treatment, though a bit splashy and scrambled-eggish as to the use of the pigments.
A very young man, with the markings of a captain on shoulder and collar, came in and went up to General von Heeringen and showed him something-- something that looked like a very large and rather ornamental steel coal scuttle which had suffered from a serious personal misunderstanding with an ax.