Listening intently for at least two minutes, he announced with conviction that the cannonade was moving eastward.
"Which means that the Germans are withdrawing again ?" said John.
"Undoubtedly," said Fleury, his face glowing.
They listened a quarter of an hour longer, and John himself was then able to tell that the battle line was shifting.

The Germans elsewhere must have fallen back several miles, but the army about him did not yet move.

He caught a glimpse of the burly general walking back and forth in the forest, his hands clasped behind him, and a frown on his broad, fighting face.

He would walk occasionally to a little telephone station, improvised under the trees--John could see the wires stretching away through the forest--and listen long and attentively.

But when he put down the receiver the same moody look was invariably on his face, and John was convinced as much by his expression as by the sound of the guns that affairs were not going well with the Germans.
Another long hour passed and the sun moved on toward noon, but a German army of perhaps a quarter of a million men lay idle in the forest of Senouart, as John now called the whole region.
Presently the general walked down the line and John lost sight of him.
But Weber reappeared, coming from the other side of the hillock, and John was glad to see him, since Fleury had gone back to attend to a wounded friend.
"There doesn't seem to be as much action here as I expected," said Weber, cheerfully, sitting down on the grass beside young Scott.
"But they're shaking the world there! and there!" said John, nodding to right and to left.
"So they are.