nothing.

There were intervals of a few seconds between the firing. The Belgian [?
French] batteries were pounding away on the left quite near (the booming
seemed to come from behind the houses at our backs), and the German on
the right, farther away.

Now, you may have hated and dreaded the sound of guns all your life, as
you hate and dread any immense and violent noise, but there is something
about the sound of the first near gun of your first battle that, so far
from being hateful or dreadful, or in any way abhorrent to you, will
make you smile in spite of yourself with a kind of quiet exultation
mixed very oddly with reminiscence[16] so that, though your first
impression (by no means disagreeable) is of being "in for it," your
next, after the second and the third gun, is that of having been in for
it many times before. The effect on your nerves is now like that of
being in a very small sailing-boat in a very big-running sea. You climb
wave after high wave, and are not swallowed up as you expected. You
wait, between guns, for the boom and the shock of the next, with a
passionate anticipation, as you wait for the next wave. And the sound of
the gun when it comes is like the exhilarating smack of the wave that
you and your boat mean to resist and do resist when it gets you.

You do not think, as you used to think when you sat safe in your little
box-like house in St. John's Wood, how terrible it is that shells should
be hurtling through the air and killing men by whole regiments. You do
not think at all. Nobody anywhere near you is thinking that sort of
thing, or thinking very much at all.

At the sound of the first near gun I found myself looking across the
road at a French soldier. We were smiling at each other.

When we tried to get to Schoonard from the west end of the town we were
stopped and turned back by the General in command. Not in the least
abashed by this _contretemps_, Mr. L., after some parley with various
officers, decided not to go back in ignominious safety by the way we
came, but to push on from the east end of the village into the open
country through the line of fire that stretched between us and the road
to Zele. On our way, while we were about it, he said, we might as well
stop and have a look at the Belgian batteries at work--as if he had said
we might as well stop at Olympia and have a look at the Motor Show on
our way to Richmond.

At this point the unhappy chauffeur, who had not found h