When once detached, as it were, from the vague murmurs of the breathing air
it becomes curiously insistent. It throbs on the ear almost like the
beating of a pulse--baleful, sepulchral, like the strokes of doom. We begin
counting them, wondering whether they are the guns of the enemy or our own,
speculating as to the course of the battle.
We have become spectators of the great tragedy, and the throb of the guns
touches the scene with new suggestions. Those cloud shadows drifting across
the valley and up the slopes of the downs on the other side take on the
shapes of massed battalions. The apparent solitude does not destroy the
impression. There is no solitude so complete to the outward eye as that
which broods over the country when the armies face each other in the grips
of death. I have looked from the mountain of Rheims across just such a
valley as this. Twenty miles of battle front lay before me, and in all that
great field of vision there was not a moving thing visible. There were no
cattle in the fields and no ploughmen following their teams.
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