We stopped first at an observation station cunningly hidden in a haw
thicket on the brow of a steep and heavily wooded defile overlooking the
right side of the river valley---the river, however, being entirely out
of sight. Standing here we heard the guns speak apparently from almost
beneath our feet, and three or four seconds thereafter we saw five
little puffballs of white smoke uncurling above a line of trees across
the valley. Somebody said this was our battery shelling the French and
English in those woods yonder, but you could hardly be expected to
believe that, since no reply came back and no French or English
whatsoever showed themselves. Altogether it seemed a most impotent and
impersonal proceeding; and when the novelty of waiting for the blast of
sound and then watching for the smoke plumes to appear had worn off, as
it very soon did, we visited the guns themselves. They were not under
our feet at all. They were some two hundred yards away, across a field
where the telephone wires stretched over the old plow furrows and
through the rank meadow grass, like springs to catch woodcock.
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