Looking up into that void, we deny the uselessness of the act and seek in vain to follow the trains of those unseen things that make the air electric with their presence. We hear them coming, passing, going, but see not one of them.
"There's whole blacksmith's shops sailing over our heads on the way to Germany," Pat Guahn shouts in my ear. "I guess the Dutchman sure knows how to call for help. He doesn't care for that first wallop, and he thinks he would like about a half million reserves from the Russian front."
"That darkness out in No Man's Land don't make any hit with him either," Stanton contributes. "He's got it lit up so bright I'm homesick for Broadway."
Now comes the thunder of the shell arrivals. You know the old covered wooden bridges that are still to be found in the country. Have you ever heard a team of horses and a farm wagon thumping and rumbling over such a bridge on the trot?
Multiply the horse team a thousand times. Lash the animals from the trot to the wild gallop. Imagine the sound of their stampede through the echoing wooden structure and you approach in volume and effect the rumble and roar of the steel as it rained down on that little German salient that night.
"Listen to them babies bustin'," says Griffin. "I'm betting them groundhogs is sure huntin' their holes right now and trying to dig clear through to China."
That was the sound and sight of that opening salvo from all guns, from the small trench mortars in the line, the lightest field pieces behind them, the heavy field pieces about us and the ponderous railroad artillery located behind us.
Its crash has slashed the inkiness in front of us with a lurid red meridian. I don't know how many hands had pulled lanyards on exactly the same instant but the consequent spread of fire looked like one continuous flame.
Now the "seventy-fives" are speaking, not in unison, but at various speeds, limited only by the utmost celerity of the sweating gun crews.
But the German front line is not the only locality receiving unsolicited attention. Enemy gun positions far behind the lines are being plastered with high explosives and anesthetised with gas shells.