"They're gunners," said Bertrand; "as soon as a shell's burst they sprint and rummage for the fuse in the hole, for the position of the fuse gives the direction of its battery, you see, by the way it's dug itself in; and as for the distance, you've only got to read it—it's shown on the range-figures cut on the time-fuse which is set just before firing."
"No matter—they're off their onions to go out under such shelling."
"Gunners, my boy," says a man of another company who was strolling in the trench, "are either quite good or quite bad. Either they're trumps or they're trash. I tell you—"
"That's true of all privates, what you're saying."
"Possibly; but I'm not talking to you about all privates; I'm talking to you about gunners, and I tell you too that—"
"Hey, my lads! Better find a hole to dump yourselves in, before you get one on the snitch!"
The strolling stranger carried his story away, and Cocon, who was in a perverse mood, declared: "We can be doing our hair in the dug-out, seeing it's rather boring outside."
"Look, they're sending torpedoes over there!" said Paradis, pointing. Torpedoes go straight up, or very nearly so, like larks, fluttering and rustling; then they stop, hesitate, and come straight down again, heralding their fall in its last seconds by a "baby-cry" that we know well. From here, the inhabitants of the ridge seem like invisible players, lined up for a game with a ball.
"In the Argonne," says Lamuse, "my brother says in a letter that they get turtle-doves, as he calls them. They're big heavy things, fired off very close. They come in cooing, really they do, he says, and when they break wind they don't half make a shindy, he says."
"There's nothing worse than the mortar-toad, that seems to chase after you and jump over the top of you, and it bursts in the very trench, just scraping over the bank."