und beat upon us, making us reel
backward, and for just the one-thousandth part of a second I saw a round
white spot, like a new baseball, against a cloud background. The
poplars, which had bent forward as if before a quick wind-squall, stood
up, trembling in their tops, and we dared to breathe again. Then each
in its turn the other four guns spoke, profaning the welkin, and we
rocked on our heels like drunken men, and I remember there was a queer
taste, as of something burned, in my mouth. All of which was very fine,
no doubt, and very inspiring, too, if one cared deeply for that sort of
thing; but to myself, when the hemisphere had ceased from its
quiverings, I said:

"It isn't true--this isn't war; it's just a costly, useless game of
playing at war. Behold, now, these guns did not fire at anybody visible
or anything tangible. They merely elevated their muzzles into the sky
and fired into the sky to make a great tumult and spoil the good air
with a bad-tasting smoke. No enemy is in sight and no enemy will answer
back; therefore no enemy exists. It is all a useless and a fussy
business, signifying nothing."

Nor did any enemy answer back. The guns having been fired with due pomp
and circumstance, the gunners went back to those pipe-smoking and
postcard-writing pursuits of theirs and everything was as before--
peaceful and entirely serene. Only the telephone man remained in his
bed in the straw with his ear at his telephone. He was still couched
there, spraddling ridiculously on his stomach, with his legs
outstretched in a sawbuck pattern, as we came away.

"It isn't always quite so quiet hereabouts," said the lieutenant. "The
commander of this battery tells me that yesterday the French dropped
some shrapnel among his guns and killed a man or two. Perhaps things
will be brisker at the ten-centimeter-gun battery." He spoke as one who
regretted that the show which he offered was not more exciting.

The twenty-one-centimeters, as I have told you, were in the edge of the
woods, with leafy ambushes about them, but the little ten-centimeter
guns ranged themselves quite boldly in a meadow of rank long grass just
under the weather-rim of a small hill. They were buried to their
haunches--if a field gun may be said to have haunches--in depressions
gouged out by their own frequent recoils; otherwise they were without
concealment of any sort. To reach them we rode a mile or two and then
walked a quarter of a mile