Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/182

 the hill and a minute later we heard the report. It came either from a mine, or a "420," which the Boches occasionally send over. After we had crawled into bed in the barn, a German aviator shot down out of the sky and played his machine gun up and down the village street. He couldn't have been more than four hundred feet high for we heard the "rack-a-tack" of his machine gun as plainly as if it had been in the court behind the barn. This was a new trick to us, but the old lady who lives next door says they have been doing it all Spring. She tells me she is eighty years old, but every day I see her working in her garden. She is very cheerful and seems to like the work, but she is shy, and hates to have people watch her. The other morning I wanted to take her picture and it took ten minutes of careful persuasion to get her consent.

Today we walked to the canal four miles south of the village and went in swimming. There were a couple of gun boats waiting here, to be sent up towards Prunay; and it gave one a queer feeling, emerging from a dive, to have this awkward steel monitor looking him in the face.