"The road continues," said the demon-driver seductively.
"Yes, but they will hear you if you go on. Stop and wait.
We've a mountain battery to look at."
They were not at work for the moment, and the Commandant, a
grim and forceful man, showed me some details of their
construction. When we left them in their bower--it looked
like a Hill priest's wayside shrine--we heard them singing
through the steep-descending pines. They, too, like the 75's,
seem to have no pet name in the service.
It was a poisonously blind country. The woods blocked all
sense of direction above and around. The ground was at any
angle you please, and all sounds were split up and muddled by
the tree-trunks, which acted as silencers. High above us the
respectable, all-concealing forest had turned into sparse,
ghastly blue sticks of timber--an assembly of leper-trees
round a bald mountain top. "That's where we're going," said
Alan. "Isn't it an adorable country?"
TRENCHES
A machine-gun loosed a few shots in the fumbling style of her
kind when they feel for an opening. A couple of rifle shots
answered. They might have been half a mile away or a hundred
yards below. An adorable country! We climbed up till we
found once again a complete tea-garden of little sunk houses,
almost invisible in the brown-pink recesses of the thick
forest.
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