The air was filled with whirring sounds. We had a vivid and fleeting vision of two aeroplanes, a French one and a Taube, passing over our heads, struggling for height and speed, engaged in a duel to the death, both of them armed with machine-guns which crackled under the open sky.
They were just on the point of vanishing when suddenly the German one dipped. The pilot was no doubt hit. The wings folded and it dropped like a stone.
"A good omen!" Guillaumin exclaimed.
Twenty minutes afterwards we started.
WE TAKE UP OUR POSITION
A magnificently monotonous memory, our march that day. It lasted from nine o'clock in the morning until six o'clock at night. Its scene was a vast tableland, completely exposed, fields of beetroot alternating with fields of corn and oats. The harvest had been got in nearly everywhere. There were groups of stacks by the roadside.
Directly we came out of the woods, we were marked by the hostile artillery. Their object was to stop us at any price by their tirs de barrage. The rumbling went on all day without a pause. It is impossible to give any idea of the horror of it. By midday, everyone of us was deaf.