through a series of chalky bare gullies, and
our escorts made us stoop low and hurry fast wherever the path wound up
to the crest of the bank, lest our figures, being outlined against the
sky, should betray our whereabouts and, what was more important, the
whereabouts of the battery to the sharpshooters in the French rifle pits
forward of the French infantry trenches and not exceeding a mile from
us.

We stopped first at an observation station cunningly hidden in a haw
thicket on the brow of a steep and heavily wooded defile overlooking the
right side of the river valley---the river, however, being entirely out
of sight. Standing here we heard the guns speak apparently from almost
beneath our feet, and three or four seconds thereafter we saw five
little puffballs of white smoke uncurling above a line of trees across
the valley. Somebody said this was our battery shelling the French and
English in those woods yonder, but you could hardly be expected to
believe that, since no reply came back and no French or English
whatsoever showed themselves. Altogether it seemed a most impotent and
impersonal proceeding; and when the novelty of waiting for the blast of
sound and then watching for the smoke plumes to appear had worn off, as
it very soon did, we visited the guns themselves. They were not under
our feet at all. They were some two hundred yards away, across a field
where the telephone wires stretched over the old plow furrows and
through the rank meadow grass, like springs to catch woodcock.

Here again the trick of taking a message off the telephone and shouting
it forth from the mouth of a fox burrow was repeated. Whenever this
procedure came to pass a sergeant who had strained his vocal cords from
much giving of orders would swell out his chest and throw back his head
and shriek hoarsely with what was left of his voice, which wasn't much.
This meant a fury of noise resulting instantly and much white smoke to
follow. For a while the guns were fired singly and then they were fired
in salvos; and you might mark how the grass for fifty yards in front of
the muzzles would lie on the earth quite flat and then stand erect, and
how the guns, like shying bronchos, would leap backward upon their
carriages and then slide forward again as the air in the air cushions
took up the kick. Also we took note that the crews of the ten-
centimeters had built for themselves dugouts to sleep in and to live in,
and had covered the sod