We were ringed about by detonations; by jars which impacted against the earth like blows of a mighty sledge on a yet mightier smithy; by demoniac screechings which tore the tortured welkin into still finer bits; by fierce clangings of metal; by thudding echoes floating back from where the charges had burst; by the more distant voices of certain German guns replying to our 'salvo as our gunners dedicated the dusk to all this unloosened hellishness and offered up to the evening star their sulphurous benedictions. It was Thor, Vulcan, Tubal Cain, Bertha Krupp and the Bethlehem Steel Works all going at full blast together; it was a thousand Walpurgis Nights rolled into one, with Dante's Inferno out-Infernoed on the side. And yet by a curious phenomenon we who stood there with this hand-made, man-made demonism unleashed and prevalent about us could hear plainly enough what a man five feet away who spoke in a fairly loud voice might be saying.
“You think this is brisk, eh?” asked our friend, the major. “Well, it's only the starter; the ball has just opened.”
He tucked his thumbs into the girth harnessings of his Sam Browne and spraddled his legs wide apart.
“Wait,” he promised; “just wait until all the guns get into action in twenty minutes or half an hour from now. Then you'll really hear something. Take it from me, you will. And in the meantime we might go along with these fellows yonder, don't you think so?”
Through the deepening twilight we followed a party of French infantrymen up a gentle slope to the crest of a little hill behind the shattered town, where the cemetery was. In this light the horizon-blue uniforms took on the colour tone of the uniforms worn by the Confederates in our Civil War, but their painted metal helmets looked like polished turtle shells. They slouched along, as the poilu loves to slouch along when not fully accoutred, their hands in their breeches pockets and their halfreefed putties flapping upon their shanks. We trailed them, and some of our soldiers, officers and enlisted men, trailed us.
Half an hour later I was to witness a curious and yet, I think, a characteristic thing. Most of the American privates grew tired of the spectacle that was spread out before them and slipped away to their billets to go to bed—this, too, in spite of the fact that scarcely one of them had ever witnessed cannonading on so extensive a scale or indeed on any scale before. Nevertheless, the bombardment speedily became to them a commonplace and rather tedious affair.
“Come on, you fellows,” I heard one tall stripling say to a couple of his mates. “Me for the hay. If the Heinies would only slam a few big ones back in this direction there might be some fun, but as it is, there's nothin' doin' round here for me.”
But the Frenchmen, all intent and alert, stayed until the show ended. Yet a thing like this was an old story to them, for they were veterans at the game whereat our men still were the greenest of novices. I suppose there was an element of theatricalism in the sight and in the fury of sound which appealed to the Gallic sense of drama that was in them. Be the cause what it was, the thing occurred just as I am telling it.
We mounted the hill and rounded the stone wall of the burying ground. The village in the hollow below had been quite battered out of its original contours, but strangely enough the cemetery, through the years of intermittent fighting and shell firing that had waged about it, was almost unscathed. It was a populous place, the cemetery was, as we had noted earlier in the day. Originally it had contained only the graves of the inhabitants, but now these were outnumbered twenty to one by mounds covering French soldiers who had fallen in action or had died of wounds or natural causes in this immediate vicinity. The same is true of hundreds of other graveyards in this country; is probably true of most of France's cemeteries.
I have seen places where the wooden crosses made hedge rows, line behind line for miles on a stretch, and so thick-set were the markers that, viewed from the distance, they conveyed the impression of paling fences.