"The French must be trying to destroy the railroad," he returned.
He was saying something else when another explosion shook the air, almost in the same place. Badly rattled, for I could see Hauptmann Kliewer and the Second Bavarian Army Corps Staff Officer calmly walking on, where every stride was bringing us nearer the track, I tried to say unconcernedly: "That's wonderful marksmanship. Two in the same place," thinking, "suppose another battery not so accurate, should open up, and missing the tracks, drop one where we stood." "Wonderful shooting," I repeated, adding to myself, "and we're walking right into it."
Whereupon Poole and I decided that if two German officers wanted to commit suicide, good enough, but as for us, we were not going another step further unless there was some other way than by this road that ran under the tracks not thirty feet from the bursting shells. Yet I found myself walking on, although my blood had long ago turned cold; and I wonder now if that is the way some men go into action, ashamed to hold back. But we weren't going into action and there was no hot, nervous frenzy of battle and patriotism to urge us on. Walking towards those explosions was a case of "going in cold."
Disobeying orders, we hurried forward, overtaking the officers, and to our amazement we learned that the explosions were not of bursting shells; but the firing of our own battery hidden behind the tracks! Sheepishly, we trudged under the trestle. We had had all the sensations of being under heavy shell fire, dangerously close, and there had been no shells at all!
Coming out from under the trestle, I saw, sleeping under the high embankment of the railway, a greenish canal. Dug in the side of the opposite bank, that slanted upward forty feet from the water, I saw a hole shaped like a door, and as I looked, an officer darted forth and, scrambling up over the slippery clay, disappeared in a scraggle of bushes. I saw the mud-spattered carriages of two German field pieces, their dull barrels lying back between the wheels and serenely pointing into the blue and gray mottled sky.
Leaving the road, we sank shin deep into a yellow ooze, and standing on some planks about the yards behind the guns, we waited. The boyish-looking artillerymen, rigid gray-green figures, so statuesque that something in the mud must have turned them to stone, they seemed waiting too. And then, from the direction of the hole in the bank, I heard:
"Links! Ein viertal tiefer!"
And the statues by the guns became alive; they darted this way and that. They reminded me of sprinters leaving the mark. One leaped to the sights. "Links! Ein viertal tiefer!" And as the man on the bank bellowed again, the soldiers at the sights began tugging madly on something I could not see; and I knew that the range receiving telephones must be in that cave in the bank, for it dawned upon me now what that shouting meant: "Left! A quarter deeper." Sight the gun to the left, advancing the range a quarter—some scale on the gun obviously—and they would get the French! I glanced towards the shouter; he was disappearing into the hole in the bank.
I saw another of the boyish artillerymen bend down over one of the brown straw baskets that stood in neat little piles and lift from it a shell, evidently heavy, for while stripping off a waterproofed cover, he rested the projectile on his knee. As he darted towards the opened muzzle, the waterproof cover fell in the mud, but instantly the soldier who had just lain the brown shell basket upon a pile of empties, picked up the cover and, neatly folding it, saved that too. And I saw a pile of discharged shell cases; copper was too valuable these days to leave in the mud. And as I saw them load and prepare to fire, each man doing his task with the speed and deftness of a whirling gear, I thought of it as one part of the war machine in which individuality was utterly lost in the gun; but that was before I went into the hole in the canal bank.
And then I saw that all the soldiers were holding their hands on their ears; and I was quick to put mine there too. But even then, as the gun discharged, I could feel my ear drums trembling as though they would break—the long red flash, the roar, the frightened recoil of the barrel, the dark puff of quick dispelling smoke, the air flying with black specks, and then a sound like a gigantic coil of wire being whirled through the air and a 7.7 centimeter shell was whistling towards the French line.