"It isn't always quite so quiet hereabouts," said the lieutenant. "The
commander of this battery tells me that yesterday the French dropped
some shrapnel among his guns and killed a man or two. Perhaps things
will be brisker at the ten-centimeter-gun battery." He spoke as one who
regretted that the show which he offered was not more exciting.
The twenty-one-centimeters, as I have told you, were in the edge of the
woods, with leafy ambushes about them, but the little ten-centimeter
guns ranged themselves quite boldly in a meadow of rank long grass just
under the weather-rim of a small hill. They were buried to their
haunches--if a field gun may be said to have haunches--in depressions
gouged out by their own frequent recoils; otherwise they were without
concealment of any sort. To reach them we rode a mile or two and then
walked a quarter of a mile through a series of chalky bare gullies, and
our escorts made us stoop low and hurry fast wherever the path wound up
to the crest of the bank, lest our figures, being outlined against the
sky, should betray our whereabouts and, what was more important, the
whereabouts of the battery to the sharpshooters in the French rifle pits
forward of the French infantry trenches and not exceeding a mile from
us.
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