clump of red and yellow woodbine on a low wall.
The rest lay in blackness; but I knew, from what I had seen before dusk
came, that we must be somewhere near the middle of a broad terrace--a
hanging garden rather--full of sundials and statues and flower beds,
which overhung the southern face of the Hill of Laon, and from which, in
daylight, a splendid view might be had of wooded slopes falling away
into wide, flat valleys, and wide, flat valleys rising again to form
more wooded slopes. I knew, too, from what I remembered, that the
plateau immediately beneath us was flyspecked with the roofs of small
abandoned villages; and that the road which ran straight from the base
of the heights toward the remote river was a-crawl with supply wagons
and ammunition wagons going forward to the German batteries, seven miles
away, and with scouts and messengers in automobiles and on motor cycles,
and the day's toll of wounded in ambulances coming back from the front.
We could not see them when we went to the parapet and looked downward
into the black gulf below, but the rumbling of the wheels and the
panting of the motors came up to us. With these came, also, the remote
music of those queer little trumpets carried by the soldiers who ride
beside the drivers of German military automobiles; and this sounded as
thinly and plaintively to our ears as the cries of sandpipers heard a
long way off across a windy beach.
We could hear something else too: the evening benediction had started.
Now fast, now slow, like the beating of a feverish pulse, the guns
sounded in faint throbs; and all along the horizon from southeast to
southwest, and back again, ran flares and waves of a sullen red
radiance. The light flamed high at one instant--like fireworks--and at
the next it died almost to a glow, as though a great bed of peat coals
or a vast limekiln lay on the farthermost crest of the next chain of
hills. It was the first time I had ever seen artillery fire at night,
though I had heard it often enough by then in France and in Belgium, and
even in Germany; for when the wind blew out of the west we could hear in
Aix-la-Chapelle the faint booming of the great cannons before Antwerp,
days and nights on end.
I do not know how long I stood and looked and listened. Eventually I
was aware that the courteous Von Scheller, standing at my elbow, was
repeating something he had already stated at least once.
"Those brighter flashes you see, apparently
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