Part 25 (1/2)

The great steel throats were torn open. The monsters recoiled, as if aghast at what they had done. Their white smoke curled from the muzzles. The dull horses in the road lifted their heads.

And over there, beyond the line of poplar trees, what?

One by one they fired the great guns. Then all together, several rounds. The air was torn with noise. Other batteries, far and near, took up the echo. The la.s.situde of the deadlock was broken.

And then overhead the bursting sh.e.l.l of a German gun. The return fire had commenced!

I had been under fire before. The sound of a bursting sh.e.l.l was not a new one. But there had always before been a strong element of chance in my favour. When the Germans were sh.e.l.ling a town, who was I that a sh.e.l.l should pick me out to fall on or to explode near? But this was different. They were firing at a battery, and I was beside that battery. It was all very well for the officer in charge to have said they had never located his battery. I did not believe him. I still doubt him. For another sh.e.l.l came.

The soldiers from the farmhouse had gathered behind us in the field. I turned and looked at them. They were smiling. So I summoned a shaky smile myself and refused the hospitality of the cellar full of water.

One of the troopers stepped out from the others.

”We have just completed a small bridge,” he said--”a bridge over the ca.n.a.l. Will madame do us the honour of walking across it? It will thus be inaugurated by the only lady at the front.”

Madame would. Madame did. But without any real enthusiasm. The men cheered, and another German sh.e.l.l came, and everything was merry as a marriage bell.

They invited me to climb the ladder to the lookout in the tree and look at the enemy's trenches. But under the circ.u.mstances I declined.

I felt that it was time to move on and get hence. The honour of being the only woman who had got to the front at Ypres began to weigh heavy on me. I mentioned the pa.s.sing of time and the condition of the roads.

So at last I got into the car. The officers of the battery bowed, and the men, some fifty of them, gave me three rousing cheers. I think of them now, and there is a lump in my throat. They were so interested, so smiling and cheery, that bright late February afternoon, standing in the mud of the battlefield of Ypres, with German sh.e.l.ls bursting overhead. Half of them, even then, had been killed or wounded. Each day took its toll of some of them, one way or another.

How many of them are left to-day? The smiling officer, so debonair, so proud of his hidden battery, where is he? The tiny bridge, has it run red this last week? The watchman in the tree, what did he see, that terrible day when the Germans got across the ca.n.a.l and charged over the flat lands?

The Germans claim to have captured guns at or near this place. One thing I am sure of: This battery or another, it was not taken while there were men belonging to it to defend it. The bridge would run red and the water under the bridge, the muddy field be strewn with bodies, before those cheery, cool-eyed and indomitable French gunners would lose their guns.

The car moved away, fifty feet, a hundred feet, and turned out to avoid an ammunition wagon, disabled in the road. It was fatal. We slid off into the mire and settled down. I looked back at the battery. A fresh sh.e.l.l was bursting high in the air.

We sat there, interminable hours that were really minutes, while an orderly and the chauffeur dug us out with spades. We conversed of other things. But it was a period of uneasiness on my part. And, as if to point the lesson and adorn the tale, away to the left, rising above the plain, was the church roof with the hole in it--mute evidence that even the mantle of righteousness is no protection against a sh.e.l.l.

Our course was now along a road just behind the trenches and paralleling them, to an anti-aircraft station.

I have seen a number of anti-aircraft stations at the front: English ones near the coast and again south of Ypres; guns mounted, as was this French battery, on the plain of a battlefield; isolated cannon in towers and on the tops of buildings and water tanks. I have seen them in action, firing at hostile planes. I have never yet seen them do any damage, but they serve a useful purpose in keeping the scouting machines high in the air, thus rendering difficult the work of the enemy's observer. The real weapon against the hostile aeroplane is another machine. Several times I have seen German _Taubes_ driven off by French aviators, and winging a swift flight back to their lines.

Not, one may be sure, through any lack of courage on the part of German aviators. They are fearless and extremely skilful. But because they have evidently been instructed to conserve their machines.

I had considerable curiosity as to the anti-aircraft batteries. How was it possible to manipulate a large field gun, with a target moving at a varying height, and at a speed velocity of, say, sixty miles an hour?

The answer was waiting on the field just north of Ypres.

A brick building by the road was evidently a storehouse for provisions for the trenches. Unloaded in front of it were sacks of bread, meal and provisions. And standing there in the suns.h.i.+ne was the commander of the field battery, Captain Mignot. A tall and bearded man, essentially grave, he listened while Lieutenant Puaux explained the request from General Foch that I see his battery. He turned and scanned the sky.

”We regret,” he said seriously, ”that at the moment there is no aeroplane in sight. We will, however, show Madame everything.”

He led the way round the corner of the building to where a path, neatly banked, went out through the mud to the battery.

”Keep to the path,” said a tall sign. But there was no temptation to do otherwise. There must have been fifty acres to that field, unbroken by hedge or tree. As we walked out, Captain Mignot paused and pointed his finger up and somewhat to the right.

”German shrapnel!” he said. True enough, little spherical clouds told where it had burst harmlessly.

As cannonading had been going on steadily all the afternoon, no one paid any particular attention. We walked on in the general direction of the trenches.

The gunners were playing prisoner's base just beyond the guns. When they saw us coming the game ceased, and they hurried to their stations. Boys they were, most of them. The youth of the French troops had not impressed me so forcibly as had the boyishness of the English and the Belgians. They are not so young, on an average, I believe. But also the deception of maturity is caused by a general indifference to shaving while in the field.