Bang—bang, it went again. From the rear came the deep bass of a big gun and close by sounded the sharp bang—bang—bang of a little balloon-gun in the second trench. There was a burst of flame up in the air, followed by a hail of metal splinters. "Cut that out. You're shooting at us!" roared Captain Lange across to the battery.
"Stop firing!" came a quick order from there. A few cannon shots were heard coming from the rear.
Suddenly a bright light appeared up in the air and a white magnesium cluster descended slowly, lighting up all the trenches in a sudden blaze which made the pioneers look like ghosts peering over the black brink of the pits. Then the light went out, and the eyes trying in vain to pierce the darkness saw nothing but glittering fiery red circles. The Japanese batteries on the other side opened fire. The air-ship had entirely disappeared, and no one knew whether the uncanny night-bird had been friend or foe.
The assault on Hilgard was to be begun by the 28th and 32d Volunteers: General MacArthur had originally planned to have the attempt made at dawn on August 15th; but as one brigade of Wood's Division had not yet arrived, he postponed the attack for twenty-four hours, to the sixteenth of August, while the fifteenth was to be taken up with heavy firing on the enemy's position, which seemed to have been somewhat weakened. As soon, therefore, as day broke, the Americans opened fire, and all the time that almost sixty American guns were bombarding Hilgard and sending shell after shell over the town, and the white flakes of cotton from the bursting shrapnels hovered over the houses and almost obscured the view of the mountains and the shells tore up the ground, sowing iron seed in the furrows, the 28th and 32d Volunteers lay in the trenches without firing a single shot.
The commander of the 16th Brigade, to which the two regiments belonged, was in the first trench during the morning, and, in company with Colonel Katterfeld, inspected the results of the bombardment through his telescope, which had been set up in the trench. A shrapnel had just destroyed the top of the copper church tower, which the Japanese were using as a lookout.
Although the American shells had already created a great deal of havoc in Hilgard, the walls of the houses offered considerable resistance to the hail of bullets from the shrapnels. The brigadier-general therefore sent orders to the battery stationed behind and to the right of the trenches to shell the houses on both sides of the street leading into Hilgard.
"Shell the houses on both sides of the street leading into Hilgard! Shell the houses on both sides of the street leading into Hilgard—Shell—Hilgard," was the command which was passed along from mouth to mouth through the trenches, until it reached the battery amid the roar of battle.
"—Shells—we have no shells—shrapnels—the battery has no shells, only shrapnels—" came back the answer after a while.
"No shells, I might have known it, only those everlasting shrapnels. How on earth can I shoot a town to pieces with shrapnel!" growled the brigadier-general, going into the protected stand where the telephone had been set up.