They were very well driven. The middle horses and the wheelers were doing
their work: it was not only the leaders that kept the traces taut. It was
wonderfully pretty to see them go by: not like a storm but like a smoke.
No one could have hit those gunners or those teams. Whether they were on
the sky-line or not I could not tell, but at any rate they could have been
seen just for that moment from beyond the Sioule. And when they massed up
again, beyond--some seconds afterwards--one heard the pop-pop from over
the valley, which showed they had been seen just too late.
Hours and hours after that I went on with the young fellows. The guns I
could not keep with: I walked with the line. And all the while as I walked
I kept on wondering at the change that comes over European things. This
army of young men doing two years, with its odd silence and its sharp
twittering movements, and the sense of eyes all round one, of men glancing
and appreciating: individual men catching an opportunity for cover; and
commanding men catching the whole countryside.... Then, in the early
afternoon, the bugles and the trumpets sounded that long-drawn call which
has attended victories and capitulations, and which is also sounded every
night to tell people to put out the lights in the barrack-rooms.
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