"Any aeroplanes?"
"None over the battery, Herr Hauptmann."
The captain gave a final glance at himself in the French wall-mirror which hung over the table, touched lightly with his finger-tips the black and white ribbon of the Iron Cross upon his breast, as though flickering away a speck of dust, and turned to go. As he went the hanging calendar caught his eye. He tore off the top leaf. The date revealed was September 15th, 1916.
He climbed, with the heavy step of an oldish man, the narrow steep thirty-tread stairway, and emerged into the blue sky of a clear dawn. Around him was bare rolling downlike country. About half a mile directly in front of him the village of Flers huddled itself among thin trees, its skeletal roofs silhouetted against the blue. Between him and it, but close at hand in a slight depression of the ground, the four 105[4] mm. guns of his battery stood spaced and silent under veils of a gauzelike material tufted with green and brown that blended well with the terrain. Inconspicuous even to a side view, thus covered they were invisible from above. Near them were stacks of ammunition also shrouded. Save for a sentry the guns were deserted. The personnel of the battery was lined up in two queues, where the smoke of a couple of field kitchens betokened breakfast.
The battery dug-outs were excavated in the breast of a slight swelling of the downs, their exits looking N.W., on the flank of the gun positions. The battery commander stood for a moment surveying his little community banded for the service of the four veiled idols lying unhuman and aloof from the domestic needs of men. Then, following his morning habit, he turned and climbed the little rise of ground. On his accustomed view-point he stopped and gazed westward. Before him, clear in the cold early light, the undulating downs gathered themselves into a long, fairly regular ridge, some two miles distant at the summit. A maze of communication and support trenches, just visible, criss-crossed their white lines in the chalk of the hither slope. On the skyline of the ridge directly west a large clump of bare, shell-sharpened tree-stumps broke its emptiness. It was the Bois de Foureaux. Further south a similar group of stumps spiked up into the sky—the Bois de Delville.[5] That clean-swept landscape mounting to the desolate skyline was the great dominant fact in his existence. Ever concrete in his mind, it claimed his first waking vision even as the weather horizon claims the first heed of the sailor, or Vesuvius the morning glance of the Neapolitan. This morning it lay cloudless—save for the towering smoke of an occasional shell-burst in the vicinity of the Bois de Foureaux—and strangely quiet. The whole wide stretch would have seemed untenanted by man had it not been for the occasional primrose twinkle of a field-gun's flash. The reports of such guns came in isolated slams at varying intervals. To his right an English shell hurried with a long-drawn whine to burst heavily in Flers. Far back several enemy aeroplanes, tiny specks in the cold blue sky yellowing to the dawn, were dodging like midges among a smother of little brown shell puffs. From overhead came the drone of a German machine. But, by contrast with the frequent uproar which welled out of this region to translate itself into long thick smoke along the ridge, the scene was curiously clear and silent.
Satisfied with his scrutiny, the Captain turned and descended again to the battery position. He passed along the line of dug-outs in the flank of the rise until he reached one whose entrance bore the notice "Fernsprecher und Befehls Unterstand"[6] neatly painted on a board. The Oberfeldwebel standing at the doorway sprang to a precise, heel-clicking salute. The officer acknowledged it curtly and dived into the dug-out.
Here yellow electric light replaced the cool grey dawn and tobacco smoke floated in long wreaths about the bulb. A young lieutenant, seated at the telephone instrument on the table, took the pipe out of his mouth and rose smartly as his superior entered.
"Good morning, Eberstein," said the captain. "Anything fresh?"
"Nothing, Herr Hauptmann," replied the lieutenant respectfully.
"Nothing of this rumoured attack?"