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Every now and then we passed a long string of seventy-fives, or a train of supply waggons or army ambulances, and at intervals a cavalryman cantered by, his cloak bellied out by the gale; but of ordinary people about the common jobs of life, not a sign.
It set up in the dwarf that incredibly rapid rhythm that you saw and shook him not to atoms but to electrons!" "They had a gun on the West Front a seventy-five," said O'Keefe, "that broke the eardrums of everybody who fired it, no matter what protection they used. It looked like all the other seventy-fives but there was something about its sound that did it. They had to recast it."
There were a few wagons, a battery of seventy-fives, a soup kitchen or two and a long column of mules from Fontanes. Two American muleteers knocked at the inn door and came stamping into the hallway, asking for a loaf and a bottle of red wine. Maryette rose from the table to find provisions; the airman got up also, saying in English: "Where do you come from, boys?"
Once we passed a long line of "Seventy-fives" going single file up a hillside, farther on we watched a big detachment of artillery galloping across a stretch of open country.
One of our haphazard turns at last brought us into a muddy bye-road with long lines of "Seventy-fives" ranged along its banks like grey ant-eaters in some monstrous menagerie. A little farther on we came to a bemired village swarming with artillery and cavalry, and found ourselves in the thick of an encampment just on the move.
It would be far-fetched to say that any airman ever looks forward zestfully to the business of being shot at with one hundred and fives; and seventy-fives, if they are well placed, are unpleasant enough. After one hundred hours of it, we have learned to assume that attitude of contemptuous toleration which is the manner common to all pilotes de chasse.
"The grayness of the dawn was illuminated by sheets of green and red flame and black oily clouds rolled along the valley toward the river like smoke from a burning 'gusher. "Suddenly the air was filled with shrill whistling, as shells of the seventy-fives were hurled against the attackers.
They had occupied the ruins for a few moments and then had been driven out. Elsewhere they had never emerged from the woods; they had approached the western shore, but the French had met them with machine guns and "seventy-fives." The brown woods at my feet were nothing but a vast cemetery; thousands of French and German soldiers slept there. In their turn the Germans had gone back.
We soon saw to what use they were put, for at every cross-road or railway bridge a warm sentry-box of mud and straw and plaited pine-branches was plastered against a bank or tucked like a swallow's nest into a sheltered corner. A little farther on we began to come more and more frequently on big colonies of "Seventy-fives."
The defenses begin with barbed wire; then come the rifles and the machine guns; and behind them the light artillery, the "seventy-fives," and the heavy artillery, the "one hundred and twenties," "two hundred and twenties," and, now, an immense howitzer whose real caliber has been carefully concealed.
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