"I understand," exclaims the German gutturally. "Pig, good pig! I understand!"
And an unctuous laugh spreads all over his greasy face, happy at this display of camaraderie which promises so well for him, as vile and loathsome as are all Boches when at the mercy of a conqueror.
Mouilly. Other roads descend from the woods, all choked with processions of wounded, and still more wounded, moving slowly down into the village. Dressing-stations have been set up in the barns; about them is a litter, constantly increasing, of stained bandages and blood-soaked pieces of cotton-wool, extending in some cases almost into the middle of the road. From the interior of the barns emanate sharp cries, speaking eloquently of bitter pain and endurance; the air reeks with the pungent smell of iodoform.
About the little church, with its shell-shattered windows, lies the cemetery, with its mossy tombstones and rust-eaten metal crosses. Empty, newly-dug graves yawn; so many little mounds bear the fresh marks of the pick! And towards this cemetery some stretcher-bearers come, walking slowly and in time, carrying between them stretchers, hurdles, step-ladders, on which still figures lie, rigid beneath the rough cloth covering them.
We come to a halt near the Amblonville Farm, whose spacious and strongly-built walls look down over wide and rolling grass-lands, moist and verdant. The Mouilly Road terminates there: it stretches away before us, crossing a stream over a little stone bridge, passes a silver-surfaced lake, which acts as a mirror to the superb trees about it, to become winding and narrow near some sombre woods, amid which a half-hidden windmill arises, and finally scales the abrupt heights behind which lies the village.
Behind the summit some 75's are firing steadily and slowly. Lower down, guns, horses and their drivers, and ammunition wagons, appearing as though sighted through the wrong end of a telescope, flow almost imperceptibly this way and that, like weeds slowly waving in the depths of a river.
We make a fire, and soon potatoes begin to glaze and blacken among the glowing cinders. As a matter of sheer habit we eat them, defying such inconveniences as dyspepsia or enteritis or dysentery, from one or the other of which almost all of us have suffered for a month past.
German aeroplanes come circling above us in the course of the afternoon. Our shells hurtle towards them like gigantic rockets minus their tail of sparks. Puffs of smoke, shot through for an instant by a golden glow, follow the aircraft, describing drifting circles about them, white as driven snow. They continue their flight, however, wheeling through space like birds of prey, watching always. A few bombs are dropped, burying themselves in the earth about us. One of them explodes violently, rather uncomfortably close at hand. The cyclist, who was lying down, jumped hastily to his feet and examined his foot.
"Not a scratch!" he exclaimed. "It only cut open my shoe!"
Down into the grass where he had been dozing he sank again, waving his hand towards the whistling shells: