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Distinct were the moving figures of the gunners and bright was the gleam of the empty shells dropping out of the breach of the soixante-quinze as the barrel swung back in place and of the loaded shells going home; distinct were paths and trenches and all the detail of the tired, worn landscape, with the old trenches where we were sitting tumbling in and their sides fringed with wild grass and weeds, which was Nature's own little say in the affair and a warning that in a few years after the war she and the peasant will have erased war's landmarks.
He had little considerate ways like that. It's coming from Scotland, et puis ca pese soixante-quinze kilos. Oh, it's big. It's enormous. The last one weighed, he hesitated, forgetful, 'much, much less, he finished. He paused, looking like a man who has solved a problem by stating it. 'One hundred and fifty pounds, exclaimed his father, just as eager as the boy.
It was pleasant to sit calmly in a cellar and receive food at the hands of an accomplished chef, and in more peaceful times there was opportunity to study the idiosyncrasies of German gunners and the peculiar merits of the Soixante-Quinze.
One trench mortar would consume in an hour plum puddings for an orphan school. For you might pause to think of it in this way if you chose. Thousands do at the front. Down on the banks of the Somme the blue uniforms of the French in place of the British khaki hovered around the gun-emplacements; the soixante-quinze with its virtuoso artistic precision was neighbor to the British eighteen-pounder.
In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside Roye and the lines beyond Suzanne. It was what the French call la rafale des tambours de la mort the ruffle of the drums of death.
The meal which that hotel restaurant served was as good as in peace times. Who deserves a good meal if not the officer who comes in from the front? And madame sees that he gets it. She is as proud of her poulet en casserole as any commander of a soixante-quinze battery of its practice. There was steam heat, too, in the hotel, which gave an American a homelike feeling.
The shell has a diameter of about.75 inch and weighs about four ounces. The gun is a hybrid of the mitrailleuse and the French "Soixante-quinze," combining the firing rapidity of the former with the recoil mechanism of the latter. This missile has established its ability to penetrate the defensive armouring of any aeroplane and the motor of the machine at 1,000 yards' range.
Every tree in a wood near by is torn and beheaded; hardly one has the top remaining. The new green pushes out amongst the blackened trunks. One speaks low in Nieuport, the place is so horribly dead. Mr. Bevan showed me a shell-hole 42 feet across, made by one single "soixante-quinze" shell.
The sharp "tang" of the French "Soixante-quinze" cracked out between the duller thuds of the "Cent- vingt" and other heavy guns, and there were only brief moments of silence between those violent explosions and the long-drawn sighs of wind as the shells passed overhead and then burst with that final crash which scatters death.
French 75's, without a question," answered Henri when they had listened for a few moments. "There's nothing else on earth in the artillery line that snaps and barks quite like our soixante-quinze, and it seems to me that they are opened in this direction. Hope to goodness they won't turn their muzzles on this wood, for they would rake it from end to end with shrapnel. Now let's move on a little.
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