Our horses were bivouacked in the courtyard of a sawmill. Not an accident there. I counted them all at a glance.
The underground shelter of the men was in the back of the yard, and I went to the air-hole which was stopped up by a piece of sheet-iron which served as a screen against splinters.
“Oh, down there! Men of the echelon. All outside. To horse. We must hurry. Come on, hurry up! Your masks, helmets, forward with just the bridle!”
One by one they jumped out of their lairs, grimacing as the bright sun struck them full in the face as they came out of the darkness.
“Each one two horses, by squads of six.... One hundred yards between each squad. The other men will remain here and mobilize the pack saddles and caissons in the cellar. Take the road to the Caix station ... on the road lined with poplars.... On the gallop ... no straggling.”
Some minutes later we were already going out of the village. It was a bad passage, but the only one and the shortest one to reach our destination, but three hundred yards had to be covered on entirely unprotected ground opposite the Boches.
Boom! It was the expected. The shells began to fall again. A cloud tinted with red from the tiles of a falling house rises in the air and makes a large spot in the sky back by the church.
Boom! There’s another one now and nearer to us, near the sugar refinery.
A crash, an avalanche of bricks; this time it is the chimney of the sawmill which falls on the horses’ cantonment. It was time, five minutes sooner and we would have been under it.