WATCHING THE GUN-FIRE
It must have been a hot fight. A village, wrecked as is usual
along this line, opened on it from a hillside that overlooked
an Italian landscape of carefully drawn hills studded with
small villages--a plain with a road and a river in the
foreground, and an all-revealing afternoon light upon
everything. The hills smoked and shook and bellowed. An
observation-balloon climbed up to see; while an aeroplane
which had nothing to do with the strife, but was merely
training a beginner, ducked and
swooped on the edge of the
plain. Two rose-pink pillars of crumbled masonry, guarding
some carefully trimmed evergreens on a lawn half buried in
rubbish, represented an hotel where the Crown Prince had once
stayed. All up the hillside to our right the foundations of
houses lay out, like a bit of tripe, with the sunshine in
their square hollows. Suddenly a band began to play up the
hill among some trees; and an officer of local Guards in the
new steel anti-shrapnel helmet, which is like the seventeenth
century sallet, suggested that we should climb and get a
better view. He was a kindly man, and in speaking English had
discovered (as I do when speaking French) that it is simpler
to stick to one gender. His choice was the
feminine, and the
Boche described as "she" throughout made me think better of
myself, which is the essence of friendship. We climbed a
flight of old stone steps, for generations the playground of
little children, and found a ruined church, and a battalion in
billets, recreating themselves with excellent music and a
little horseplay on the outer edge of the crowd. The trouble
in the hills was none of their business for that day.
Still higher up, on a narrow path among the trees, stood a
priest and three or four officers. They watched the battle
and claimed the great bursts of smoke for one side or the
other, at the same time as they kept an eye on the flickering
aeroplane.
"Ours," they said, half under their breath.
"Theirs." "No, not ours that one--theirs! . . . That fool
is banking too steep . . . That's Boche shrapnel. They
always burst it high. That's our big gun behind that outer
hill . . . He'll drop his machine in the street if he
doesn't take care . . . There goes a trench-sweeper.
Those last two were theirs, but
that"--it was a full roar
--"was ours."
