“They sounded as if they came from a thousand miles.”
Another salvo was fired, the shells droning lazily over the heads of the men and crashing terrifically more than a mile distant.
And then the smaller guns were unlimbered. The spiteful crack of the seventy-fives turned the funereal music into a scherzo. In retaliation the German batteries, the heavier ones, began, their shells flying high overhead.
Lieutenant Bedford jumped up. “All right, Third Platoon. Up you come. Keep straight ahead and remember your three-yard interval. If any one gets hit, let him lie.” And then, as if he were uncertain, as if he wanted to convince himself of the actuality of the words he had just spoken, he added: “Those are the orders.”
“I always knew they hated the Third,” said Lepere, “but blamed if I knew they hated our guts so much that they put us in the first wave.”
But Kahl only grinned. He was conscious of a feeling as if his face had become frozen and as if his chin were about to drop off. It hung slackly and his teeth came unnaturally together when he clinched his jaws. He tightened the chin-strap of his helmet, guarding against the chance of losing his chin. Next, his feet felt so awfully heavy. They would barely permit themselves to be lifted from the ground. They had become separate identities, and as he became conscious of them he felt them to be unfamiliar.
“Damn this mud,” he told himself, though knowing well that there was no mud weighing down his feet.
After pounding away for fifteen minutes, the smaller artillery stopped. The whistle blew and the men advanced, stepping out in the open where the risen sun made them hideously conspicuous. The field separating the woods stretched far on either side, and was covered with green-stemmed wheat that reached hip-high.
Kahl, glancing over his shoulder, saw the rays of the sun flashing from the clean bayonets, the bayonets the men so often had jabbed into sacks of sand and straw.
The sergeant in charge of the first wave set the pace, which was frightfully slow. Somewhere, farther down the line, men began to object to the snail-like progress.