Other civilians had come that way before--had seen, and
grinned, and complimented and gone their way, leaving the
gunners high up on the bleak hillside to grill or mildew or
freeze for weeks and months. Then she spoke. Her voice was
higher pitched, it seemed, than ours--with a more shrewish
tang to the speeding shell. Her recoil was as swift and as
graceful as the shrug of a French-woman's shoulders; the empty
case leaped forth and clanged against the trail; the tops of
two or three pines fifty yards away nodded knowingly to each
other, though there was no wind.
"They'll be bothered down below to know the meaning of our
single shot. We don't give them one dose at a time as a
rule," somebody laughed.
We waited in the fragrant silence. Nothing came back from the
mist that clogged the lower grounds, though no shell of this
war was ever launched with more earnest prayers that it might
do hurt.
Then they talked about the lives of guns; what number of
rounds some will stand and others will not; how soon one can
make two good guns out of three spoilt ones, and what crazy
luck sometimes goes with a single shot or a blind salvo.
LESSON FROM THE "BOCHE"
A shell must fall somewhere, and by the law of averages
occasionally lights straight as a homing pigeon on the one
spot where it can wreck most.
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