The guns having been fired with due pomp and circumstance, the gunners went back to those pipe-smoking and postcard-writing pursuits of theirs and everything was as before-- peaceful and entirely serene.

Only the telephone man remained in his bed in the straw with his ear at his telephone.

He was still couched there, spraddling ridiculously on his stomach, with his legs outstretched in a sawbuck pattern, as we came away.
"It isn't always quite so quiet hereabouts," said the lieutenant.

"The commander of this battery tells me that yesterday the French dropped some shrapnel among his guns and killed a man or two.

Perhaps things will be brisker at the ten-centimeter-gun battery." He spoke as one who regretted that the show which he offered was not more exciting.
The twenty-one-centimeters, as I have told you, were in the edge of the woods, with leafy ambushes about them, but the little ten-centimeter guns ranged themselves quite boldly in a meadow of rank long grass just under the weather-rim of a small hill.