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Page 10
"Man will often go where a dog won't," said Wharton, sententiously.
"And the night is growing worse," continued Carstairs. "Hear that wind
howl! Why, it's driving the snow before it in sheets! The trenches won't
dry out in a week!"
"You might be worth hearing if you'd only quit talking and say
something, Carstairs," said Wharton.
"If you obeyed that rule, Wharton, you'd be known as the dumb man."
John stood up straight and looked over the trench toward the German
lines, where he saw nothing. The night filled with so much driving snow
had become a kind of white gloom, less penetrable than the darkness.
Only that shifting white wall met his gaze, and listen as he would, he
could hear nothing. The feeling of something sinister and uncanny,
something vast and mighty returned. Man had made war for ages, but never
before on so huge a scale.
"Well, Sister Anna, otherwise John Scott, make your report," said
Carstairs lightly. "What do you see?"
"Only a veil of snow so thick that my eyes can't penetrate it."
"And that's all you will see. Papa Vaugirard is a good man and he cares
for his many children, but he's making a mistake tonight."
"I think not," said John, dropping suddenly back into the trench. A
blinding white glare, cutting through the gloom of the snow, had dazzled
him for a moment.
"The searchlight again!" exclaimed Wharton.
"And it means something," said John.
The blaze, whiter and more intense than usual, played for a few minutes
over the French trenches, sweeping to right and left and back again and
then dying away at a far distant point. After it came the same white
gloom and deep silence.
"Just a way of greeting," said Carstairs.
"I think not," said John. "Papa Vaugirard makes few mistakes. To my mind
the intensity of the silence is sinister. Often we hear the Germans
singing in their trenches, but now we hear nothing."
Another half-hour of the long and trying waiting followed. Then the
white light flared again for a moment, and powerful lights behind the
French lines flared back, but did not go out. The great beams, shooting
through the white gloom, disclosed masses of men in gray uniforms and
spiked helmets rushing forward.
CHAPTER II
THE YOUNG AUSTRIAN
It seemed to John that the heavy German masses were almost upon them,
when they were revealed in the glare of the searchlights, sweeping
forward in solid masses, and uttering a tremendous hurrah. But the
French lights continued to throw an intense vivid white blaze over the
advancing columns, broad German faces and stalwart German figures
standing out vividly. Officers, reckless of death, waving their swords
and shouting the word of command, led them on.
The French field guns behind their trenches opened, sending showers of
missiles over their heads and into the charging ranks, and the trenches
themselves blazed with the fire of the rifles.
"A surprise that isn't a surprise?" shouted Carstairs. "They thought to
catch us napping in the night and the snow!"
The battle spread with astonishing rapidity over a front of more than a
mile, and in the driving snow and white gloom it assumed a frightful
character. The German guns fired for a little while over their troops at
the French artillery beyond, but soon ceased lest they pour shells into
their own men, and the heavy French batteries ceased also, lest they,
too, mow down friend as well as foe. But the light machine guns posted
in the trenches kept up a rapid and terrible crackle. The front lines of
the Germans were cut down again and again, always to be replaced by
fresh men, who unflinchingly exposed their bodies to the deadly hail.
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