Peterkin was quite safe, hugging the bottom of the shell crater under a swarm of hornets. In a surprisingly short time he became accustomed to the situation and found himself ravenously hungry, for the strain of the last twelve hours had burned up tissue. He took a biscuit out of his knapsack and began nibbling it, as became a true rodent.
XX
MARTA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF WAR
As Marta and the children came to the door of the chapel after the recitation of the oath, she saw the civil population moving along the street in the direction of the range. Suddenly they paused in a common impulse and their heads turned as one head on the fulcrum of their necks, and their faces as one face in a set stare looked skyward.
"Keep on moving! No danger!" called the major of the brigade staff. "Pass the word—no danger! It's not going to drop any bombs; it's only a scout plane trying to locate the positions of the defences we've thrown up overnight. No danger—keep moving!"
He might as well have tried to distract the attention of the grand stand from the finish of a horse-race. More than the wizard's spell, years before, at the first sight of man in flight held them in suspense as they watched a plane approaching with the speed of an albatross down the wind straight on a line with the church tower where the sharpshooters were posted. The spread of the wings grew broader; the motor was making a circle of light as large as a man's hat-box, and the aviator was the size of some enormous insect when three or four sharp reports were audible from the church tower.
Still the plane came on intact over the spire. The sharpshooters had only rimmed the target, without injury to braces or engine. But they had another chance from the windows on the nearer side of the tower; and the crowd saw there the glint of rifle barrels. This time they got the bull's-eye. The aviator reeled and dropped sidewise, a dead weight caught by the braces, with his arm dangling. A teetering dip of the plane and his body was shaken free. His face, as he neared the earth in his descent, bore the surprised look of a man thumped on the back unexpectedly.
Marta pressed her fingers to her ears, but not soon enough to keep out the sound of a thud on the roof of the building across the street from the chapel.