“And they may be bayoneting each other in that awful fog of smoke further on,” Amos continued. “Oh! it’s terrible, terrible! I never thought war was so cruel. I always pictured it as glorious, with the heroes coming home to be crowned as victors. I’ll never think of it again as I used to. General Sherman was right when he called it what he did.”
So the changes took place rapidly. It was as though they were looking through a kaleidoscope. Every puff of air raised the curtain of smoke in some new section and allowed the absorbed spectators a chance to look upon phases of the battle they had as yet failed to see.
To think, that all through that long day, while the rival armies dug new trenches confronting each other, this terrible butchery must continue, was something to chill the heart.
“Why,” burst out Amos at length, after they had been a long time in the tower, “you could almost believe the end of the world had come, with all this noise and fire. They say it won’t be a flood next time but fire that is going to destroy everything. For one, Jack, I’m beginning to get enough of this.”
“We’ll stay only a little while longer, Amos. Fact is, we’ll never run across such a splendid chance as this to watch a big battle. It is Teuton against Anglo-Saxon now, the first time they’ve been up against each other for centuries really. And this war will tell which is going to be the world leaders.”
“If the Kaiser wins we’ll all have to brush up on our German, and that’s what I don’t like much,” Amos complained.
“If that was the worst of it there’d be little reason for complaining,” Jack told him. “I suppose German is as fine a language as the next, once you get your tongue adapted to it.”
“I can see a smudge of smoke where we think the village lies, Jack, and it’s black smoke, too. Do you think the place has been set afire so as to drive the British snipers out?”
“I wouldn’t be much surprised, Amos.”
“And those poor, poor peasants, the helpless women and children, what will become of them?” exclaimed Amos.