"You up there! Let us have no more of your impertinence."
Having carefully arranged his handkerchief over his face, to shield his eyes from the sun, he continued to grumble under cover of it:
"A good pair of bath-pumps gone for nothing! I have a good mind to give up marching altogether!"
An hour later a few smoke-wreathed whizz-bangs pass over the top of the hill and fall alongside our batteries. One or two burst directly above the medley of traffic in the roadway, causing the microscopical horses (as they appeared to us), to rear and kick, and sending men, who looked to be no more than big insects, running this way and that; finally the whole concourse, like a long-drawn ribbon, moves away to vanish beneath the trees to the left. The guns remain in position.
The sunset this evening over the valley is limpid and indescribably beautiful. The sky pales to the zenith as the sinking sun glides from transparent emerald to its bed of many golds, which deepen to the crimson of leaping flames on the skyline.
Thursday, September 24th.
One half the company is quartered at the farm. A stroke of luck enabled me to snatch a good four hours' sleep in the hay. Of course there was bound to be one fly in the amber. Our barn, big and lofty, was a veritable trap for draughts. Moreover, the noise of a continual coming and going, quarrels among the men regarding their respective berths, or a lost water-bottle, or a rifle that had been substituted for another one, created an unceasing din hardly propitious to sleep. With the dawn we march back to our meadow. Once more we wait and wait, with nothing to do, knowing nothing.
Ten o'clock! An order comes to hand: "The men must get their food now or not at all, and be ready to move at a moment's notice."
The cooks are in a very bad temper because the haricot beans, defying all efforts and coaxings, remain obdurately hard.
"Not worth while making oneself ill with such stuff! They would blow out a wooden horse!"