On both flanks the thunder of massed cannon was deepening, and now John, who used his glasses occasionally, was able to see wisps and tendrils of smoke on the eastern and northern horizons. The tremor in the air was strong and continuous. It played incessantly upon the drums of his ears, and he found that he could not hear the words of the other aides so well as before. But there was no succession of crashes. The sound was more like the roaring of a distant storm.
They advanced another mile, two hundred thousand men, afire with zeal, a whole vast army moved forward as the other French armies were by the hidden hand which they could not see, of which they knew nothing, but the touch of which they could feel.
John heard a whizzing sound, he caught a glimpse of a dark object, rushing forward at frightful velocity, and then he and his wheel reeled beneath the force of a tremendous explosion. The shell coming from an invisible point, miles away, had burst some distance on his right, scattering death and wounds over a wide radius. But Vaugirard's brigades did not stop for one instant. They cheered loudly, closed up the gap in their line, and went on steadily as before. Some one began to sing the Marseillaise, and in an instant the song, like fire in dry grass, spread along a vast front. John had often wished that he could have heard the armies of the French Revolution singing their tremendous battle hymn as they marched to victory, and now he heard it on a scale far more gigantic than in the days of the First French Republic.
The vast chorus rolled for miles and for all he knew other armies, far to right and left, might be singing it, too. The immense volume of the song drowned out everything, even that tremor in the air, caused by the big guns. John's heart beat so hard that it caused actual physical pain in his side, and presently, although he was unconscious of it, he was thundering out the verses with the others.
He was riding by the side of de Rougemont, and he stopped singing long enough to shout, at the top of his voice:
"No," de Rougemont shouted back, "but he doesn't need to be. The German guns have our range."
From a line on the distant horizon, from positions behind hills, the German shells were falling fast, cutting down men by hundreds, tearing great holes in the earth, and filling the air with an awful shrieking and hissing. It was all the more terrible because the deadly missiles seemed to come from nowhere. It was like a mortal hail rained out of heaven. John had not yet seen a German, nothing but those tongues of fire licking up on the horizon, and some little whitish clouds of smoke, lifting themselves slowly above the trees, yet the thunder was no longer a rumble. It had a deep and angry note, whose burden was death.