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On the concrete terrace beside him a gatling-gun glimmered in the starlight; sentinels leaned on their elbows, sprawling across the parapets; shadowy ranks of sleeping men lay among the shrubbery below, white-faced, exhausted, motionless. There were low voices from the darkened ballroom, the stir and tinkle of spurred boots, the ring of sabres.
She appeared very tall, ghostlike even, in her soft, white raiment, as she moved across and drew up the sucking blind. Above the gray parapets of the houses, and the ranks of contorted chimney-pots, the loveliness of the summer dawn grew wide. Warm amber shaded through gradations of exquisite and nameless colour into blue.
The Chevalier perched himself upon one of the citadel's parapets. The southwest wind was tumbling the waters of the river and the deep blues of the forests seemed continually changing in hues. Forces within him were at war. He was uneasy. That his father had fought D'Hérouville on his account there could be no doubt. What a sorry world it was, with its cross-purposes, its snarled labyrinths!
These bombing parties consisted of three or four men with bayonets to lead, and behind them two or three bomb throwers to throw bombs at the enemy ahead of the bayonet men. The leading bayonet men carried a flag which they were to plant in the parapets as they passed along so that the supporting infantry would know not to fire on them.
The crisis was over, and from that second I was cold, cool, and calculating. I looked upon all that followed from the purely pictorial point of view, and even felt annoyed if a shell burst outside the range of my camera. Why couldn't Bosche put that shell a little nearer? It would make a better picture. And so my thoughts ran on. The earth was down. I swung my camera round on to our own parapets.
The troops of Parma, crowding on the palisade, and looking over the parapets, now began to greet the exhibition with peals of derisive laughter. It was but child's play, they thought, to threaten a Spanish army, and a general like Alexander Farnese, with such paltry fire-works as these.
The tortuous wall girdle, long since snapped, of the little swollen city, half held in place by careful civic hands wanders in narrow file between parapets smoothed by peaceful generations, pausing here and there for a dismantled gate or a bridged gap, with rises and drops, steps up and steps down, queer twists, queer contacts, peeps into homely streets and under the brows of gables, views of cathedral tower and waterside fields, of huddled English town and ordered English country.
Turquoise patches of sky and big clouds, leafy parapets, ships passing to the sea; and in mid-stream an anchored island of steel painted white and buff, bristling with long thin guns, the flower-like flag rippling astern; another battle-ship farther north; another, another; and farther still the white tomb unlovely mansion of the dead on outpost duty above the river, guarding with the warning of its dead glories the unlovely mansions of the living ranged along the most noble terrace in the world.
So elaborate and skilful were the enemy defences that the powerful lenses failed to detect any trace of the rifle pits and sand-bagged parapets of the trenches. Nor were any troops visible. The top of the table-land looked as deserted as an unexplored land in the Polar regions. Wilmshurst lowered his binoculars.
Platform and bridge were swarming with men-at-arms; they crowded the parapets, looking down upon us curiously but with no evidence of hostility. Rador drew a deep breath of relief. "We don't have to break our way through, then?" There was disappointment in the Irishman's voice. "No use, Larree!" Smiling, Rador stopped the corial just beneath the arch and beside one of the piers. "Now, listen well.
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