So if you have wills to make, you American gentlemen, you should be making them now before we start." A gay young officer was Lieutenant Geibel, and he just naturally would have his little joke whether or no.
Immediately then and twice again that day we were technically presumed to be under fire--I use the word technically advisedly--and again the next day and once again two days thereafter before Antwerp, but I was never able to convince myself that it was so.

Certainly there was no sense of actual danger as we sped through the empty single street of a despoiled and tenantless village.

All about us were the marks of what the shellfire had done, some fresh and still smoking, some old and dry- charred, but no shells dropped near us as we circled in a long swing up to within half a mile of the first line of German trenches and perhaps a mile to the left of them.
Thereby we arrived safely and very speedily and without mishap at a battery of twenty-one-centimeter guns, standing in a gnawed sheep pasture behind an abandoned farmhouse, what was left of a farmhouse, which was to say very little of it indeed.

The guns stood in a row, and each one of them--there were five in all--stared with its single round eye at the blue sky where the sky showed above a thick screen of tall slim poplars growing on the far side of the farmyard.

We barely had time to note that the men who served the guns were denned in holes in the earth like wolves, with earthen roofs above them and straw beds to lie on, and that they had screened each gun in green saplings cut from the woods and stuck upright in the ground, to hide its position from the sight of prying aeroplane scouts, and that the wheels of the guns were tired with huge, broad steel plates called caterpillars, to keep them from bogging down in miry places--I say we barely had time to note these details mentally when things began to happen.