"I will show you—watch," he replied, talked into the 'phone again, and far away a cloud, a cloud of brick dust, smoked aloft. "Voilà!"
He thereupon pointed out all the objects of local interest in the same fashion.
"We will now give him fifty rounds for luck, and then we will return to my cellar for a cup of coffee," said he, and a further twenty yards of Hun parapet were removed.
Suddenly there came an answering salvo from Hunland, and a flock of shells whizzed over our heads.
"Tiens!" my Captain exclaimed. "He has lost his little temper, has he? Naughty, naughty! I must give him a slap. A hundred rounds!" he shouted into the 'phone, and the German lines spouted like a school of whales blowing.
Again the Bosch slammed across a heavy reply. My Captain leapt to his 'phone. "He would answer me back, would he? The impudence! Give him a thousand rounds, my children!"
Then for the next hour or so the sky was filled with a screaming tornado of shells, rushing, bumping, and bursting, and the Bosch lines sagged, bulged, quivered, slopped over, and were spattered against the blue in small smithereens.
"And now let us see what he says to that," said my Captain pleasantly. We waited, we watched, we listened; but there came no reply (possibly because there was no one left to make one), and my Captain turned to me, shoulders shrugged, palms outspread, a grimace of apologetic disgust on his mobile face—like a circus-master explaining that his clown has got the measles: "Nottin, see you? Pas d'esprit, l'animal!"
Certainly Hans the Hun does not seem to be enjoying the same high spirits he did of yore. Possibly he is beginning to regret the day he left the old beer garden, his ample Gretchen, and the fatty foods his figure demands. The story of Patrick and Goldilocks would tend to prove as much.