We were soon to verify the truth of this remark.
CHAPTER XV
We had turned the corner of the road on which we had just witnessed the effect of the big shell—the hole was still smoking—when once again we heard the distant whine. This time there was no need to ask what it meant; we knew all too well, and for an anxious moment or two we wondered whether after its arrival the newspapers would speak well of us, or whether we should be blown into such small pieces that we should only be reported "missing."
It is recorded that sometimes those who are drowning are able, in a few brief moments, to rehearse the drama of their lives. Our lives must have been too complicated for such hasty revision, but as the sound changed from a whine to a shriek, an unearthly roar, and with a crash like the crack of doom the ground opened before us and shot a blinding storm of rocks and mud sky high—when all this occurred far, far faster than I can pen the lines, we had plenty of time to develop a nasty pain in the pit of the stomach, to which the mystic torment of an unripe cucumber is a joy. A great cavity yawned before us where once the road had been, and belched forth clouds of smoke as if the crust of hell were riven in twain. At the same moment, lest our tranquillity should be restored too soon, our own guns opened up with a vicious roar and hurled their screeching shells over our heads like myriads of fiends possessed. Reggy's face was a study in black and white—I couldn't see my own.
"Do you think the Germans see us?" he enquired anxiously of Jack.
"No, I think not," Jack reassured him; "it's customary for them to shell any good road in the hope of picking off a convoy."
"It's a damned uncomfortable custom," Reggy returned earnestly, "and I could forgive them for not observing it for the next ten minutes."
The chauffeur, who had stopped the car dead by using the emergency brake, now released it, and we started forward again. But we had considerable difficulty in navigating the ditch on the side of what had been the road.
We had just moved in time, for a second shell dropped where we had been a moment since, and tore the opposite side of the road away.
"Being between two lines of artillery is a little too much like battledore and shuttlecock," I remarked to Reggy, "with all the odds against the shuttlecock."