LITMIR.BIZ

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was, the thing occurred just as I am telling it.

      We mounted the hill and rounded the stone wall of the burying ground. The village in the hollow below had been quite battered out of its original contours, but strangely enough the cemetery, through the years of intermittent fighting and shell firing that had waged about it, was almost unscathed. It was a populous place, the cemetery was, as we had noted earlier in the day. Originally it had contained only the graves of the inhabitants, but now these were outnumbered twenty to one by mounds covering French soldiers who had fallen in action or had died of wounds or natural causes in this immediate vicinity. The same is true of hundreds of other graveyards in this country; is probably true of most of France’s cemeteries.

      I have seen places where the wooden crosses made hedge rows, line behind line for miles on a stretch, and so thick-set were the markers that, viewed from the distance, they conveyed the impression of paling fences.

      France has become a land of these wooden crosses and these six-foot mounds. It is part of the toll – a small part of the toll – she has paid for the right of freedom and in the fight to make this world once more a fit place for decent beings to abide in.

      On the knoll behind the cemetery we came to a halt. Night was creeping down from the foothills, making the earth black where before it had faded to a common grey; but overhead the sky still showed in the last faint traces of the afterglow, with the blue of an unflawed turquoise against which the stars stood out like crumbs of pure gold. The broken and snaggled roof lines of the clumped houses of the town were vanishing; the mountain beyond seemed creeping up nearer and nearer to us. More plainly than before we could mark out the positions of the nearmost batteries for now at each discharge of a gun a darting jab of red flame shot forth. Where all the guns of a battery were being served and fired in rapid succession the blazes ran together like hemstitches, making one think of a fiery needle plying in and out of a breadth of black velvet. Farther away the flashes were blurred into broader and paler flares so that on three sides of us the horizon was circled with constantly rising, constantly dying glows like heat lightning on a summer night.

      The points where shells fell and burst were marked for us with red geysers, which uprose straight instead of slanting out at a slightly upward tilted angle, as did the spoutings from the mouths of the guns. As nearly as we might tell the enemy fire was comparatively light. Only we could see upon the far flanks of the little mountain in front of us a distant flickering illumination, which showed that his counter batteries were busy. On every hand white signal rockets rose frequently, and occasionally flares hung burning halfway up the walls of the sky.

      Of a sudden all hell broke loose directly behind us. I use the term without desire to be profane and in a conscientious effort to give some notion of a physical occurrence. At any rate it seemed to us that all hell let loose. What really happened was that two guns of a French battery of nine-inch heavies, from their post directly in our rear and not more than an eighth of a mile distant from us, had fired simultaneously, and their shells had travelled directly over our heads, aiming for an unseen objective miles forward.

      Then, and every time thereafter that one of the nine-inchers spewed its bellyful of high explosive forth, the sound of it dominated and overmastered all other sounds. First there was the crash – a crash so great that our inadequate tongue yields neither adjective nor noun fitly to comprehend it, the trouble being that the language has not kept step with the developments of artillery in this war. Our dictionary is going to need an overhauling when this job of licking Germany is finished.

      Well, first off there was the crash that was like the great granddaddy of all the crashes in the world, making one feel that its vocal force must have folded up the heavens like a scroll. Then, as a part of it, would come the note of the projectile rushing through the ripped ether above us, and this might be likened to a long freight train travelling on an invisible aërial right of way at a speed a thousand times greater than any freight train ever has or ever will attain. Then there would float back a tremendous banshee wail, and finally, just before the roar of the shell’s explosion, a whine as though a lost puppy of the size of ten elephants were wandering through the skies, complaining in a homesick key as it went – the whole transaction taking place in an infinitesimal part of the time which has here been required for me to set down my own auricular impressions of it, and incidentally creating an infinitely more vivid impression than possible can be suggested by my lame and inadequate metaphors.

      Comparatively, there was a hush in the clamour and clangour succeeding this happening – not that the firing in any way abated, for rather was it augmented now – but only that it seemed so to me; and in the lull, away off on our left, I could for the first time make out the whirring, ripping sound of a machine gun or a row of machine guns.

      The major consulted the luminous face of his wrist watch.

      “I thought so,” he vouchsafed. “It’s time for the barrage to start and for the boys to go over the top. Now we ought to see some real fireworks that’ll make what has gone on up to now seem puny and trifling and no account.”

      Which, all things considered, was an underestimation of what ensued hard on the heels of his announcement. Personally I shall not attempt to describe it; the size of the task leaves me abashed and mortified. But if the reader in the goodness of his heart and abundance of his patience will re-read what already I have written in an effort to tell him what I had heard and had seen and had felt, and will multiply it by five, adding, say, fifty per cent of the sum total for good measure, he will have, I trust, a measure of comprehension of the ensemble. But he must do the work; my founts are dry.

      Furthermore, he must imagine the augmented hullabaloo – which should be pronounced hella-baloo – going on for twenty-five minutes at such rate that no longer might one distinguish separate reports – save only when the devil’s fast freight aforementioned passed over our heads – but all were mingled and fused into one composite, continuous, screeching, whining, wailing, splitting chorus.

      Twenty-five minutes thus, and then a green rocket went up from near the forward post of command where those directly in charge of the operation watched, and before it had descended in a spatter of emerald sparks which dimmed out and died as they neared the earth the firing from our batteries began to lessen in volume and in rapidity. Within those twenty-five minutes the real object of the operation had taken place. Either the raiders had gone over the top or they had been driven back in; either they had accomplished their design of penetrating the enemy’s second line of defences or they had failed. In any event the movement, all carefully timed and all mathematically worked out, was as good as over. To learn better at firsthand exactly what results had been obtained we returned to the village and passed through it and picking our way in the inky darkness went along a road toward the post of command.

      The road, though, was deserted, and after a bit we retraced the way back to the building where we had supped and made ourselves comfortable in the room of the colonel of the regiment holding the line at this particular point. An orderly brought us the last of the doughnuts to nibble on, and upon the ancient hearthstone we took turns at cracking French hazelnuts with a hammer while at intervals the building jarred to the thumpings of such guns as continued to fire.

      Nearly an hour passed, and then in came the colonel and with him a French liaison officer, both of them with tired lines about their mouths. They had been under a strain, as their looks showed, and they flung themselves down on adjacent cots with little sighs of relief and told us the news. In a way the raid had been a success; in another way it had not. All the men who went over the top had returned again after penetrating up to the German secondary trenches. Several of the Frenchmen had been wounded, not seriously. None of the Americans had anything worse than barbed-wire cuts and bruised shins to show for his experience.

      Returning, the raiders reported that our fire had completely obliterated the hostile front trench and had ripped its protecting wire jungle into broken ends. Likewise it had completely abolished such boches as had tarried too long in the enemy’s forward pits and posts. Of these unfortunates only dismembered trunks had been found, with one exception. This exception was a body lying in a shell hole, and not badly mangled but completely nude. By some freak the shell which killed the German had stripped him stark naked down to his boots.

      But the total of prisoners taken was zero, and likewise it was cipher. Forewarned

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