if he were leaving this unrelenting dampness, cold, and destruction for rest, for the South, for home? Perhaps that shell had said:
Yooooooarecominbackterala—bam!
A cloud of smoke and dust a hundred feet away followed the crash of the projectile which took the words out of my mouth. I found myself running pell-mell in a mob which included all the extra men who had been riding on the trucks. The drivers stayed with their machines. We swept over the brow of the hill and plumped down into shell-holes and behind a bank along a little-used cart path. Out of a rift of cloud dropped a German plane observing the aim of the guns.
But now, after the Boche had dropped over a few more shells, it was good to hear our guns get going in a gigantic anvil chorus—clang-whang-bang, whang-bang-clang. Twenty minutes of this, and the Boche answered no more. ("You fellows don't know what war is," said a German officer captured a few hours later; "you've never been under one of your own barrages.")
As the sun was dropping a cheer ran up the line of men along the road like fire up a trail of powder. An officer in a courier car was bringing the report that the Kaiser had abdicated. This turned out to be only one of the many such rumors which anticipated the event; but it was good to see the way our men took it. Just one loud cheer, and then back to work quickly.
