Where are the Russians? They may be crossing the open field for from the woods the shots no longer come. Everything is silent, everything but the orders that are being given in hushed but distinct tones—almost you think, as though the damp wind might pick up some secret and bear it to the Russian hordes. Where are they? This silence seems interminable.
And then one hears the faint scuffling of their feet; and out of the silence of the night comes a roar as of animals let loose, and across the fields we can see a vague moving mass. They are firing now but they are making as much noise with their voices as with their guns. To hoarse throaty yells they storm up the road. It occurs to me that they are like the Chinese whose idea of war is making a noise. Their bullets are raining through the pines and falling like hail on the houses beyond.
"Why don't your men open fire?"
"It is too soon," whispers the Ober-Lieutenant. Why did he have to whisper?
And then I see the Russians. I see them in the great blinding flash of dusty light. I see them revealed as pausing, blinking things, to whom the searchlights point with fingers of pitiless white. I see them—while all about me becomes the clamor of guns—stumble and fall; they stagger and crawl as if the long dusty flashes were lightning, striking them down; and wherever the white fingers point, there death comes; and their hoarse throaty shouts, become the wails of death; and that open belt between the pines becomes lumpy with men, while the night grows horrid with the rattle of rifles and the quick croaking beat of the guns.
They are being slaughtered out there; they are as bewildered as animals, blinking, then dying, in the glare of the lights that they knew not could come. And now the lights are throwing their dusty glimmer on the distant trees.
"They are retreating!" The Ober-Lieutenant still talks in a whisper.
And, as sweeping this way and that, making their monstrous gestures over the moaning field, the searchlights hold up as targets the scattering Russian retreat; as one after another shadowy form I see cross a beam of light only to fall, and the crash of the rifles seems to have become an unceasing din and in the sweeping flashes of white I see the piles upon the field.
The Ober-Lieutenant gives his opinion of it. "Very fine," he says. "There are many dead." And then, as if after all, this were the important thing, he adds: "To-morrow, I think we can build our entanglements."