Without yells or worry a man spoke
gently to other men, and they all limbered up, quite easily. The weight
seemed to have gone since my time. They trotted off with the pieces, and
when they crossed the little ditch at the edge of the field I waited for
the heavy clank-clank and the jog that ought to go with that well-known
episode; but I did not hear it, and I saw no shock. They got off the
field with its little ditch on to the high road as a light cart with good
springs might have done. And when they massed themselves under the cover
of a roll of land it was all done again without noise. I thought a little
sadly that the world had changed. But it was all so pretty and sensible
that I hardly regretted the change. There was a stretch of road in front
where nothing on earth could have given cover. The line was on its
stomach, firing away, and it was getting fired at apparently, in the sham
of the manoeuvre from the other side of the Sioule. As it covered this
open space the line edged forward and upward. When a certain number of the
38th had worked up like this, the whole bunch of them, from half a mile
down the road, right through the village, were moved along, and the head
of the column was scattered to follow up the firing. It was like spraying
water out of a tap. The guns still stood massed, and then at a sudden
order which was passed along as though in the tones of a conversation
(and again I thought to myself, "Surely the world is turning upside down
since I was a boy") they started off at a sharp gallop and leapt, as it
were, the two or three hundred yards of open road between cover and cover.
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