Page:History of the 305th field artillery (IA historyof305thfi01camp).pdf/62

44 The men sprang to the pieces like a football formation jumping into play. From the shelter tent the operator commenced to shout out the firing data that drifted over the repaired wire from the observatory.

"Aiming point that bare pine tree five mils to the left of the left hand edge of target. Deflection, six-three hundred and fifty. On second piece open ten. Site three hundred. Korrector thirty. Battery right. Two thousand."

The sights and the tubes responded to the febrile motions of our amateurs. The executive repeated the commands one by one. You fancied that through the taut atmosphere came their echoes from the far target. A captain ran along the line, verifying the laying. There was no longer any stirring in the underbrush, nor any movement on the road. A branch snapped. Lt. Norman Thirkield, the recording officer, balanced in a tree, precariously raised his glasses.

The brown cloth of the shelter tent bulged. The voice of the operator ran with awed vibrations across the tight silence.

"Fire when ready!"

The executive raised his hand. He brought it down with a sharp motion, bawling out:

"Fire!"

The section chief of the first piece repeated the gesture and the command. The silence was destroyed. It seemed to fall away before the snapping concussion of the discharge, and the departure, invisible but fairly sensed, of the projectile.

The operator cried:

“On the way!”

The first shot fired by the 305th sailed majestically over Long Island.

In succession the other pieces followed, and far off, in the