There was something silent and efficient in the look of the big man and the big car, with its slim-waisted, bright brass gun shoving through.
"Here, have a cigarette," said Rossiter, as the powerful thing glided by.
He passed up a box to the three gunners.
"Bonne chance," said the big man, as he puffed out rings and fondled the trim bronze body of his Lady of Death. They let the car slide down the street to the left end of the barricade, where it came to rest.
Over the canal, out from the smoke-misted houses, came a peasant running. In his arms he carried a little girl. Her hair was light as flax, and crested with a knot of very bright red ribbon. Hair and gay ribbon caught the eye, as soon as they were borne out of the doomed houses. The father carried the little one to the bridge at the foot of our street, and began crossing towards us. The barbed wire looked angry in the morning sun. He had to weave his way patiently, with the child held flat to his shoulder. Any hasty motion would have torn her face on the barbs. Shrapnel was sailing high overhead between the two forces, and there, thirty feet under the crossfire, this man and his child squirmed their way through the barrier. They won through, and were lifted over the barricade. As the father went stumbling past me, I looked into the face of the girl. Her eyes were tightly closed. She nestled contentedly.
"Did you get it, man? Did you get it?" I asked Rossiter.
"Too far," he replied, mournfully, "only a dot at that distance."
Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green grass growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent, waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding daisies. The bark of it is as alarming as its bite—an incredibly rapid rat-tat that makes men fall on their faces when they hear, like worshipers at the bell of the Transubstantiation.
"She talks three hundred words to the minute," said Romeyn to me.
"How are you coming?" I asked.