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Updated: June 4, 2025
No shells fell among them while I was at the front, and out on the plain where the battle still raged the soixante-quinze batteries were as busy as knitting-machines working some kind of magic which protected that column from tornadoes of the same kind that they themselves were sending. The German artillery, indeed, seemed a little demoralized.
The life of guns has surpassed all expectations; but the smaller calibers forward and the soixante-quinze must not suffer from general debility when they lay on a curtain of fire to cover a charge. War is still a matter of projectiles, of missiles thrown by powder, whether cannon or rifle, as it was in Napoleon's time, the change being in range, precision and destructive power.
The French light artillery opened fire in a running pursuit, advancing their guns from position to position with very brief halts, during which the famous soixante-quinze flung out shells upon bodies of troops at close range so that they fell like wheat cut to pieces in a hailstorm.
From my vantage point I could see clear to the neighborhood of Péronne. The French also were attacking; the drumhead fire of their soixante-quinze made a continuous roll, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke hung in a long, gossamery cloud fringing the horizon and the canopy of the green ridges.
Indeed, already the sharp snap of those soixante-quinze had begun to punctuate the air, and shrapnel-bursts could be seen above the evergreen tree-tops upon the snow-clad slopes, and over hollows where the enemy were massing.
There came, too, through that embrasure, or through the gateway of the fort, every now and again, the rattle of rifles, the sharp tap-tap of machine-guns, and the snap and bark of the soixante-quinze as the French sent their curtain-fire out beyond the plateau.
The signaler mimicked the whistling sound, and clicked his heels together. "Ha!" he said, "soixante-quinze good, eh?" The captain called to him, and again he revolved the handle and called to the battery. "Garsong," said Robinson, "a plate of swa-song-canned beans, si voo play and serve 'em hot" A German shell dropped again, and again the chorused howls and laughter of the Towers marked its fall.
The French infantry was hardly in the first-line German trench when the ditch had been filled in and the way was open for the soixante-quinze to go forward. For the guns galloped into action just as they might have done at manoeuvers.
War seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the ridge back of the town. The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and see the soixante-quinze and their skilful gunners.
They say the Germans slept there the night of September 4, and were driven out the next day by the French soixante-quinze, which trotted through Chauconin into Penchard by the road we had just come over. I enclose you a carte postale of a battery passing behind the apse of the village church, just as a guarantee of good faith. But all signs of the horrors of those days have been obliterated.
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