A favorite object of their attack appeared to be a
wrecked beet-sugar factory of which one side was blown away.
There would appear just above the horizon line a ball of smoke as black
as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high
explosives. Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little
blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they
told us, would be shrapnel. The German reply to the enemy's guns issued
from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; and
these German shells, so far as we might judge, passed entirely over and
beyond the smashed hamlets and the ruined sugar-beet factory and,
curving downward, exploded out of our sight.
"The French persist in a belief that we have men in those villages,"
said one of the general's aides to me. "They are wasting their powder.
There are many men there and some among them are Germans, but they are
all dead men."
He offered to show me some live men, and took me to one of the
telescopes and aimed the barrel of it in the proper direction while I
focused for distance.
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