But to the rear a clanging and a clattering, and the thudding of horse-hoofs!—“Graves, beat it back an’ flag those guns.” Graves ran frantically, waving his helmet. The guns halted in a cloud of dust, and a gunner lieutenant trotted up, jaunty, immaculate. He dismounted, in his beautiful pale-blue uniform and his gleaming boots and tiny jingling spurs, and saluted the sweating, unshaven Marine officer. He looked with his glasses, and he consulted his map, and then he smiled like a man who has gained his heart’s desire. He dashed back toward his guns, waving a signal.
The guns wheeled around; the horses galloped back; there was a whirl and bustle behind each caisson, and two gunners with a field-telephone came running. It all happened in seconds.
The first 75 barked, clear and incisive, and the shell whined away ... the next gun, and the next.... The little puff-balls, ranging shots, burst very near the Boche column. Then the battery fired as one gun—a long rafale of fire, wherein no single gun could be heard, but a drumming thunder.
Smoke and fire flowered hideously over the Boche column. A cloud hit it for a space. When the cloud lifted the column had disintegrated; there was only a far-off swarm of fleeing figures, flailed by shrapnel as they ran. And the glass showed squirming heaps of gray flattened on the ground....
The gunner officer looked and saw that his work was good. “Bon, eh? Soixante-quinze—!” With an all-embracing gesture and a white-toothed smile, he went. Already his battery was limbered up and galloping, and when the first retaliatory shell came from an indignant Boche 155, the 75s were a quarter of a mile away. The Boche shelled the locality with earnestness and method for the next hour, but he did not try to throw forward another column.... “Man, I jest love them little 75s! Swa-sont-cans bon? Say, that Frog said a mouthful!”
Sketches made by Captain Thomason at Soissons on scraps of paper taken from a feldwebel’s note-book.
The lieutenant wrote and sent back his final report: “... and final objective reached, position organized at....” and stopped and swore in amazement when he looked at his watch—barely noon! Sergeant Cannon’s watch corroborated the time—“But, by God! The way my laigs feel, it’s day after to-morrow, anyway!—” “Wake those fellows up—got to finish diggin’ in—No tellin’ what we’ll get here—” Some of his people were asleep on their rifles. Some were searching for iron crosses among the dead. A sergeant came with hands and mouth full. “Sir, they’s a bunch of this here black German bread and some stuff that looks like coffee, only ain’t—in that dugout—” And the company found that Kriegsbrot and Kaffee Ersatz will sustain life, and even taste good if you’ve been long enough without food....
The shadows turned eastward; in the rear bloated observation balloons appeared on the sky-line. “Them fellers gets a good view from there. Lonesome, though....” “Wonder where all our planes went—don’t see none—” “Hell! Went home to lunch! Them birds, they don’t allow no guerre to interfere with they meals. Now, that’s what I got against this fighting stuff—it breaks into your three hots a day.” “Boy, I’m so empty I could button my blouse on the knobs of my spine! Hey—yonder’s a covey o’ them avions now—low—strung out—Boche! Hit the deck!”
They were Boche—sinister red-nosed machines that came out of the eye of the sun and harrowed the flattened infantry, swooping one after another with bursts of machine-gun fire. Also they dropped bombs. Some of them went after the observation balloons, and shot more than one down, flaming, before they could be grounded. And not an Ally plane in sight, anywhere! To be just, there was one, in the course of the afternoon; he came from somewhere, and went away very swiftly, with five Germans on his tail. The lieutenant gathered from the conversation of his men that they thought the Frenchman used good judgment.