If you are lying down under fire—flat under pretty smart fire—and you have only a paper bag in front of your head for cover you feel immeasurably safer than you do without it. You have a mind at rest. This must be the same thing.
It remained dark and quiet. It was forty-five minutes: it became forty-four … forty-three … forty-two minutes and thirty seconds before a crucial moment and the slate grey cases of miniature metal pineapples had not come from the bothering place. … Who knew if there was anyone in charge there?
Twice that night he had sent runners back. No results yet. That bothering fellow might quite well have forgotten to leave a substitute. That was not likely. A careful man. But a man with a mania might forget. Still it was not likely! …
Thoughts menaced him as clouds threaten the heads of mountains but for the moment they kept away. It was quiet; the wet cool air was agreeable. They had autumn mornings that felt like that in Yorkshire. The wheels of his physique moved smoothly; he was more free in the chest than he had been for months.
A single immense cannon, at a tremendous distance said something. Something sulky. Aroused in its sleep and protesting. But it was not a signal to begin anything. Too heavy. Firing at something at a tremendous distance. At Paris, may be: or the North Pole: or the moon! They were capable of that, those fellows!
It would be a tremendous piece of frightfulness to hit the moon. Great gain in prestige. And useless. There was no knowing what they would not be up to, as long as it was stupid and useless. And, naturally boring. … And it was a mistake to be boring. One went on fighting to get rid of those bores—as you would to get rid of a bore in a club.
It was more descriptive to call what had spoken a cannon than a gun—though it was not done in the best local circles. It was all right to call seventy-fives or the implements of the horse artillery “guns”; they were mobile and toy-like. But those immense things were cannons; the sullen muzzles always elevated. Sullen, like cathedral dignitaries or butlers. The thickness of barrel compared to the bore appeared enormous as they pointed at the moon, or Paris, or Nova Scotia.
Well, that cannon had not announced anything except itself! It was not the beginning of any barrage; our own fellows were not pooping off to shut it up. It had just announced itself, saying protestingly, “Can … non,” and its shell soaring away to an enormous height caught the reflection of the unrisen sun on its base. A shining disc, like a halo in flight. … Pretty! A pretty motive for a decoration, tiny pretty planes up on a blue sky amongst shiny, flying haloes! Dragon flies amongst saints. … No, “with angels and archangels!” … Well, one had seen it!
Cannon. … Yes, that was the right thing to call them. Like the upended, rusted things that stuck up out of parades when one had been a child.
No, not the signal for a barrage! A good thing! One might as well say “Thank Goodness,” for the later they began the less long it lasted. … Less long it lasted was ugly alliteration. Sooner it was over was better. … No doubt half-past eight or at half-past eight to the stroke those boring fellows would let off their usual offering, probably plump, right on top of that spot. … As far as one could tell three salvoes of a dozen shells each at half minute intervals between the salvoes. Perhaps salvoes was not the right word. Damn all artillery, anyhow!
Why did those fellows do it? Every morning at half-past eight; every afternoon at half-past two. Presumably just to show that they were still alive, and still boring. They were methodical. That was their secret. The secret of their boredom. Trying to kill them was like trying to shut up Liberals who would talk party politics in a nonpolitical club … had to be done, though! Otherwise the world was no place for … Oh, postprandial naps! … Simple philosophy of the contest! … Forty minutes! And he glanced aside and upwards at the phosphorescent cockscomb! Within his mind something said that if he were only suspended up there. …
He stepped once more on to the rifle-step and on to the bully-beef-case. He elevated his head cautiously: grey desolation sloped down and away F.R.R.R.r.r.r.! A gentle purring sound!
He was automatically back, on the duckboard, his breakfast hurting his chest. He said:
“By Jove! I got the fright of my life!” A laugh was called for: he managed it, his whole stomach shaking. And cold!
A head in a metal pudding-basin—a Suffolk type of blond head, pushed itself from a withdrawn curtain of sacking in the gravel wall beside him, at his back. A voice said with concern:
“There ain’t no beastly snipers, is there, sir. I did ’ope there would’n be henny beastly snipers ’ere. It gives such a beastly lot of extra trouble warning the men.”
Tietjens said it was a beastly skylark that almost walked into his mouth. The Acting Sergeant-Major said with enthusiasm that them ’ere skylarks could fair scare the guts out of you. He remembered a raid in the dark, crawling on ’is ’ands ’n’ knees wen ’e put ’is ’and on a skylark on its nest. Never left ’is nest till ’is ’and was on ’im! Then it went up and fair scared the wind out of ’im. Cor! Never would ’e fergit that!
With an air of carefully pulling parcels out of a carrier’s cart he produced from the cavern behind the sacking two blinking assemblages of tubular khaki-clad limbs. They wavered to erectness, pink cheeses of faces yawning beside tall rifles and bayonets. The Sergeant said:
“Keep yer ’eds down as you go along. You never knows!”
Tietjens told the Lance-Corporal
