Bang!
Another shell, he felt sure, had come close to its objective point. Still Number Eight kept plugging steadily along, and while the boy's thoughts were fixed intently on the crossroad a series of bright flashes accompanied by crashing reports from the top of a high bank almost overhead nearly startled the life out of him.
A battery of soixante-quinze, or seventy-fives, had suddenly gone into action. The force of the concussions was so frightful as to cause the ambulance to shake and tremble in the most violent fashion. The young ambulancier's head seemed to be fairly bursting.
Guns on the other side of the road now began blazing away, and to the rolling, volleying, crashing reports was joined the echoes hurled back by the surrounding hills.
A tir de barrage[12] was on.
Fearful that his ear-drums might be permanently injured, Don strove to get away with all possible speed, but the road was slippery, the hill rather steep, and under the circumstances Number Eight could only crawl along.
He found the strain almost unendurable.
The roar gradually became louder, at last culminating in one mighty, reverberating crescendo, like the rolling and booming of continuous thunder, which jarred the earth with its appalling intensity.
As the car neared the top of a slope Don Hale, scarcely able to control his jumping nerves, became a witness to one of the most marvelous and stupendous spectacles which man has ever given to the world.
From the heights both to the north and south as far as his vision could reach, guns of many calibers were belching forth their messengers of death so fast that in places the spurts of livid fire piercing the blackness appeared almost to join together and form a flickering line of flame. All the elements of the sublime, the terrible and the unreal were there; and so awestruck and thrilled was the boy that, actually forgetting the danger which threatened him, he brought the ambulance to a halt and gazed with wonderment on the scene.