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 shell 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 shell.
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.
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