Page:The Shield (Knopf, 1917).djvu/223

Rh stopped on the hill-crest, they turned the regiment into a confused mob of breathless and perplexed men. Some even forgot to lower their rifles.

Before them the hazy network of rain was still hanging and the distances stretched, strange and hostile. But now the fields were astir with flickering pale flames and a ceaseless scattered cracking of guns. In the grey sky a small black dot was discernible, seemingly motionless, but changing in size. When it grew larger, a faint buzzing was heard from above and made the soldiers turn their grey, ghastly faces upward. . . . Then a mighty buzzing suddenly resounded behind the regiment, and a Russian aeroplane flew over the heads of the men like a drenched bird. As the aeroplane rose higher and higher, the soldiers watched the distance between it and the small black dot far up in the sky grow smaller and smaller.

Voices were now heard from the ranks and when the black dot was rapidly beginning to grow smaller, sinking, as it were, in the sky and approaching the horizon, those voices became loud and gay.