Thereby we arrived safely and very speedily and without mishap at a
battery of twenty-one-centimeter guns, standing in a gnawed sheep
pasture behind an abandoned farmhouse, what was left of a farmhouse,
which was to say very little of it indeed. The guns stood in a row, and
each one of them--there were five in all--stared with its single round
eye at the blue sky where the sky showed above a thick screen of tall
slim poplars growing on the far side of the farmyard. We barely had
time to note that the men who served the guns were denned in holes in
the earth like wolves, with earthen roofs above them and straw beds to
lie on, and that they had screened each gun in green saplings cut from
the woods and stuck upright in the ground, to hide its position from the
sight of prying aeroplane scouts, and that the wheels of the guns were
tired with huge, broad steel plates called caterpillars, to keep them
from bogging down in miry places--I say we barely had time to note these
details mentally when things began to happen.
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