"Digging trenches?" he asked, hurling a potato into the bucket.
I understand French spoken slowly, Pryor, who was educated in Paris,
speaks French and he told the potato-peeler that we had been at work
since five o'clock that morning.
"The Germans will never get back here again unless as prisoners." (p. 281)
"They might thrust us back; one never knows," said Pryor.
"Thrust us back! Never!" The potato swept into the bucket with a whizz
like a spent bullet. "Their day has come! Why? Because they're beaten,
our 75 has beaten them. That's it: the 75, the little love. Pip! pip!
pip! pip! Four little imps in the air one behind the other. Nothing
can stand them. Bomb! one lands in the German trench. _Plusieurs
morts, plusieurs blesses._ Run! Some go right, some left. The second
shot lands on the right, the third on the left, the fourth finishes
the job. The dead are many; other guns are good, but none so good as
the 75."
"What about the gun that sent this over?"
Pryor, as he spoke, pointed at the percussion cap of one of the gigantic
shells with which the Germans raked La Bassee Road in the early stages
of the war, what time the enemy's enthusiasm for destruction had not
the nice discrimination that permeates it now. A light shrapnel shell
is more deadly to a marching platoon than the biggest "Jack Johnson."
The shell relic before us, the remnant of a mammoth Krupp design, (p. 282)
was cast on by a shell in the field heavy with ripening corn and rye,
opposite the doorway.
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