''And they thought we wouldn't fight'', Floyd Phillips Gibbons [hot novels to read .TXT] 📗

and twenty seconds later with every man standing on his toes in his prescribed position.

Ten rounds later, a shell from number three gun exploded thirty feet after leaving the bore. Shell particles buried themselves in the ground near the battery. Piece number four, right next to it, was due to fire in ten seconds. It discharged its projectiles on the dot. The gun crews knew what they were up against. They were firing faulty ammunition. They passed whispered remarks but reloaded with more of the same ammunition and with military precision on the immediate command. Every man stuck to his position. As each gun was fired the immediate possibilities were not difficult to imagine.

Then it happened.

"Commence firing," megaphoned the firing executive. The section chief of number one piece dropped his right hand as the signal for the discharge. The corporal gunner was sitting on the metal seat in front of his instruments and not ten inches to the left of the breech. Cannoneer number one of the gun crew occupied his prescribed position in the same location to the immediate right of the breech. Gunner number two was standing six feet behind the breech and slightly to the left ready to receive the ejected cartridge case. Gunner number three was kneeling over the fuse setter behind the caisson which stood wheel to wheel with the gun carriage. Gunners four and five were rigid statues three feet back of him. Every man in the crew had seen the previous bursts of dangerous ammunition.

Number one's eye caught the descending hand of the section chief. He pulled the lanyard.

There was an eruption of orange coloured flame, a deafening roar, a crash of rendered steel, a cloud of smoke blue green, and yellow.

A black chunk of the gun cradle hurtled backward through the air with a vicious swish. A piece of the bore splintered the wheels and buried itself in the ammunition caisson. Thick hunks of gun metal crumbling like dry cake filled the air. The ground shook.

The corporal gunner pitched backward from his seat and collapsed on the ground. His mate with fists buried in his steel seared eyes staggered out of the choking fumes. The rest of the crew picked themselves up in a dazed condition. Fifty yards away a horse was struggling to regain his feet.

Every man in the three other gun crews knew what had happened. None of them moved from their posts. They knew their guns were loaded with shells from the same lot and possibly with the same faults. No man knew what would happen when the next firing pin went home. The evidence was before them. Their eyes were on the exploded gun but not for long.

"Crash," the ten second firing interval had expired. The section chief of piece number two had dropped his hand. The second gun in the battery had fired.

"Number two on the way," sang out the signalman over the telephone wire to the hidden observation station.

Ten seconds more for another gun crew to cogitate on whether disaster hung on the dart of a firing pin.

"Crash."

"Number three on the way."

Another ten seconds for the last section to wonder whether death would come with the lanyard jerk.

"Crash."

"Number four on the way." Round complete. The signalman finished his telephone report.

Four horses drawing an army ambulance galloped up from the ravine that sheltered them. The corporal gunner, unconscious and with one leg pulverised was lifted in. Two other dazed members of the crew were helped into the vehicle. One was bleeding from the shoulder. The lead horses swung about; the ambulance rattled away.

"Battery ready to fire. Piece number one out of action." It was the signalman reporting over the wire to the observer.

Battery X fired the rest of the morning and they used ammunition from the same lot and every man knew what might happen any minute and every man was in his exact position for every shot and nobody happened to think about hiding in a dugout and putting a long string on the firing lanyard.

It had been an unstaged, unconscious demonstration of nerve and grit and it proved beyond all question the capacity of American artillerymen to stand by the guns.

The gunner corporal told the nurse at his bedside how it all happened, but he was still under the effects of the anesthetic. He did not refer to the morale of his battery mates because it had not occurred to him that there was anything unusual in what they did. But he did think that he could wiggle the toes on his right leg. The doctor told me that this was a common delusion before the patient had been informed of the amputation.

Incidents such as the one related had no effect whatever upon the progress of the work. From early dawn to late at night the men followed their strenuous duties six days a week and then obtained the necessary relief on the seventh day by trips down to the ancient town of Besançon.

In this picturesque country where countless thousands fought and died, down through the bloody centuries since and before the Christian era, where Julius Cæsar paused in his far flung raids to dictate new inserts to his commentaries, where kings and queens and dukes and pretenders left undying traces of ambition's stormy urgings, there it was that American soldiers, in training for the war of wars, spent week-end holidays and mixed the breath of romance with the drag of their cigarettes.

The extender of Roman borders divided that region into three parts, according to the testimony of the first Latin class, but he neglected to mention that of these three parts the one decreed for American occupation was the most romantic of them all.

It is late on a Saturday afternoon and I accept the major's offer of a seat in his mud-bespattered "Hunka Tin." The field guns have ceased their roar for the day and their bores will be allowed to cool over Sunday. Five per cent. of the men at the post have received the coveted town leave.

They form a khaki fresco on the cab and sides of the giant commissary trucks that raise the dust along the winding white road over the hills. Snorting motorcycles with two men over the motor and an officer in the side car skim over the ground, passing all others. A lukewarm sun disappears in a slot in the mountains and a blue grey mist forms in the valleys. A chill comes over the air and a cold new moon looks down and laughs.

It is a long ride to the ancient town, but speed laws and motor traps are unknown and the hood of the Detroit Dilemma shakes like a wet dog as her sizzling hot cylinders suck juice from a full throttle. We cross one divide through a winding road bordered by bushy trees and as orderly as a national park. We coast through a hillside hamlet of barking dogs and saluting children who stand at smiling attention and greet our passage with a shrill "Veev La Mereek" (Vive l'Amérique).

We scud across a broad, level road built well above the lowland, and climb through zig-zagging avenues of stately poplars to the tunnel that pierces the backbone of the next ridge.

While the solid rock walls of the black bore reverberate with the echoes from our exhaust, we emerge on a road that turns sharply to the left and hugs a cliff. Below winds a broad river that looks like mother of pearl in the moonlight. The mountain walls on either side rise at angles approximating 45 degrees, and in the light their orderly vineyards look like the squares on a sloping checkerboard. In front of us and to the right the flanking ridges converge to a narrow gorge through which the river Doub runs to loop the town.

Commanding this gorge from the crests of the two rocky heights are sinister sentinels whose smooth, grey walls and towers rise sheer from the brink of the cliffs. The moonlight now catching the ramparts of the em-battlements splashes them with strokes of white that seem ever brighter in contrast with the darker shadows made by projecting portions of the walls. Spaniard and Moor knew well those walls, and all the kingly glory that hurried France to the reign of terror has slept within their shadows.

Our way down the cliff side is hewn out of the beetling rock. To our left, a jagged wall of rock rises to the sky. To our right, a step, rock-tumbled declivity drops to the river's edge.

The moonlight brings funny fancies, and our yellow headlights, wavering in concentric arcs with each turn of the course, almost seem to glint on the helmets and shields of the spear-bearing legionaries that marched that very way to force a southern culture on the Gauls. We slow down to pass through the rock-hewn gate that once was the Roman aqueduct bringing water down from mountain springs to the town.

Through the gate, a turn to the left and we reach the black bottom of the gorge untouched by the rising moon. We face a blast of wind that slows our speed and brings with it the first big drops of rain. We stop at the "Octroi" and assure the customs collector that we are military, and that we carry no dutiable wine, or beans or wood into the town.

Yet another gate, built across the narrow road between the cliff and the river, and we enter the town. It has been raining and the cobblestones are slippery. They shine in the gleams of pale light that come from the top-heavy street lamps. Gargoyle water spouts drip drainage from the gables of moss-speckled tiles.

We pass a fountain that the Romans left, and rounded arches further on show where the hooded Moor wrote his name in masonry. Barred windows and stone balconies projecting over the street take one's mind off the rattling motor and cause it to wander back to times when serenading lovers twanged guitars beneath their ladies' windows and were satisfied with the flower that dropped from the balcony.

The streets are wet and dark now and through their narrow windings our headlights reveal tall figures in slickers or khaki overcoats topped by peaked felt hats with the red cords of American artillerymen. Their identification is a surprise to the dreamer, because one rather expects these figures to sulk in the deeper shadows and screen their dark, bearded faces with the broad brims of black felt hats or muffle themselves to the chin in long, flowing black cloaks that hide rapiers and stilettos and other properties of mediæval charm.

We dine in a room three hundred years old. The presence of our automobile within the inner quadrangle of the ancient building jars on the sense of fitness. It is an old convent, now occupied by irreligious tenants on the upper three floors, restaurants and estaminets on the lower floor. These shops open on a broad gallery, level with the courtyard, and separated from it only by the rows of pillars that support the arches. It extends around the four sides of the court.

Centuries ago shrouded nuns, clasping beads or books of office, walked in uncommunicative pairs and mumbled their daily prayers beneath these time-worn arches, and to-night it affords a promenade for officers waiting for their meals to be served at madame's well laid tables within.

Madame's tables are not too many. There is not the space economy of an American café, where elbows interlock and waiters are forced to navigate fearsome cargoes above the diners' heads. Neither is there the unwholesome, dust-filled carpet of London's roast beef palaces.

Madame's floor is bare, but the wood has stood the scrubbings of years, and is as spotless as grass-dried linen. The high ceiling and the walls are of white stucco. In bas-relief are clusters of heraldic signs, of bishops' crooks and cathedral keys, of mounted