Roudon stands up in his stirrups, turns around, and shouts commands to the uneasy men:
“Close up, close up, close up, I say.... Dress up together.”
He leads the column rapidly, now closed up into a compact group like a flock of sheep, towards the road from Harbonnières, which is lined with trees that will conceal us from the aeroplane.
Two other bombs burst behind us one after another.
“That makes four. He can’t have many left. He didn’t bring a truck!”
Some hundred yards away near a pond cows graze absolutely indifferent to the battle in the air. The “75” again begins to fire. Its bursts of shrapnel come close to the aeroplane but do not hit it.
Another bomb. I stop. It looks as though it were going to fall in front of us. I’m not going to put my head under the knife. So I start to draw my horse back under the trees.
There it is. It has fallen in the fields again. But its explosion throws up dismal fragments, large and bloody ones. It fell squarely on the herd of cows and annihilated it.
“The bungler! He’s wasting the milk,” comes in the accent of the faubourgs nearly under my horse’s feet.
Hard by, in the hole of the “320,” Lace’s half-section has placed its battery. I had approached it without seeing it as I drew back under the threat of the bomb.