The Oberleutnant advanced to meet him, and, looking calmly at his chief as though his smoke-blackened face and torn clothing were in no way out of the normal, saluted with perfect gravity.
"What has been happening?"
"We have been under heavy fire, Herr Hauptmann. All the wires are cut in many places. The telephone dug-out has been blown in. We are absolutely without communications. The battery has fired whenever there was a chance of a target. Your orders have been obeyed. The battery has stood its ground. We have only three rounds per gun left. I am waiting now for an opportunity to fire."
Listening to the cool report of his subordinate, von Waldhofer recovered his soldierly poise.
"Excellent. You have done well, Schwarz. And the casualties?"
"I regret are heavy." He waved a gloved hand towards the bare dozen standing by the guns. "All that are left."
There was the loud, hissing, nerve-paralysing rush of a shell at arrival. Simultaneously with the shattering crash that leaped from the fountain of black smoke, Oberleutnant Schwarz put his hand to his breast, performed a sharp half-turn and fell—dead.
The reverberation yet rang when a second rush and crash followed the first. A third and fourth shook the air almost too quickly for distinction. The battery commander's brain worked with the timeless speed of a great crisis or a dream. In an incomputable fraction of a second he saw the heavy barrage which preceded the slowly crawling monster, was conscious of an aeroplane overhead, saw his opportunity and his plan. He ran towards the guns, shouting: "Lie down! Lie down!" The crews obeyed. Standing among the strewn corpses the guns seemed manned only by the dead. He flung himself prone on the flank of the battery.
Shell after shell swooped and burst on the stretch of ground in front of him. Fed by the constantly spouting black geysers, an ever-thickening dark mist drifted across, blotted out the distance. Through it he saw the freshly thrown edges, brown and white, of unfamiliar shell-craters pocking the undulating ground. The worn, smooth greensward that he had known was being churned into loose clay and chalk, mingled haphazard in their fall from the fierce upward gush. The reiterated crash upon crash of near explosions all but obliterated the far-flung din of the general battle, but through them he caught waves of an appalling uproar welling out of Flers. Slowly, riving, crashing, upspouting its black fountains of smoke and earth, the barrage marched onward, passing across the battery front. Now? Through the mist he saw the directing aeroplane sweep down in front of him, absurdly low, rattling its machine-gun. A group of grey figures sprang up beneath it, both arms high above the head, tumbling among the shell-holes as they ran. A temptation flitted across his mind. One round gun-fire and that aeroplane was blown to fragments. His lips tightened. He did not move. The battery seemed abandoned by all its dead.
Age-long seconds passed as he watched, peering through the thinning mist. Save for one little group of hasty, self-obliterating men, his immediate front was a deserted waste of churned earth, sloping gently upwards away from him. Once, over the low near skyline seen from his prone position, he thought he saw the spurt of a bomb. But he could not be sure. And a bomb did not necessarily betoken the presence of the—Thing. Yes! What was that?