With these came, also, the remote
music of those queer little trumpets carried by the soldiers who ride
beside the drivers of German military automobiles; and this sounded as
thinly and plaintively to our ears as the cries of sandpipers heard a
long way off across a windy beach.
We could hear something else too: the evening benediction had started.
Now fast, now slow, like the beating of a feverish pulse, the guns
sounded in faint throbs; and all along the horizon from southeast to
southwest, and back again, ran flares and waves of a sullen red
radiance. The light flamed high at one instant--like fireworks--and at
the next it died almost to a glow, as though a great bed of peat coals
or a vast limekiln lay on the farthermost crest of the next chain of
hills. It was the first time I had ever seen artillery fire at night,
though I had heard it often enough by then in France and in Belgium, and
even in Germany; for when the wind blew out of the west we could hear in
Aix-la-Chapelle the faint booming of the great cannons before Antwerp,
days and nights on end.
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