There they were, whole regiments of them, standing on the edge of the field opposite, just where it sloped down to form the valley Thad had spoken about.
He had been waked up too by this time, and when he saw the troops over there blazing away right for the spot almost where we were crouching, he looked pretty well scared, I can tell you.
"What are they doing, Max?" he asked, grabbing hold of my jacket, and squeezing up closer to me.
"I guess they're fighting," I replied.
"Who are they fighting with?" But just then another bang, bang, banging over our heads answered the question, and revealed to us the terrible fact that we were between two fires.
I won't pretend to say that I wasn't frightened, for I was, and I'll put it to any other fellow of eleven if he would not feel sort of trembly about the knees to wake up from a nap and suddenly find himself between two armies firing away at one another for dear life.
"But I didn't know there was any war here now," continued my brother, when there was a slight pause in the hostilities, as the newspaper writers say.
"Oh, you never can calculate on countries over here," I returned, as I wiped the perspiration from my forehead. "I s'pose the Emperor's got mad with France again, and they're going to kill off several thousand poor chaps, who don't feel mad a bit, to fix matters. Those are Germans over there; I can tell by the uniforms, so of course the French must be on our side. Now—" But at that instant the firing began again worse than ever.
The smoke filled the little valley in clouds, so we couldn't see how many men fell; and when it blew away, there was nobody lying on the ground, so we concluded they must have cleared the field of the killed and wounded under its protection.
Sometimes in the pauses of the shooting we could hear the captains and generals shouting, and the drums beating, and see the flashing bayonets, and the flags flying proudly.