Then the car stopped long enough for me to see a private give the paper to his officer, who was plainly sensible of a loss of dignity, with the courtesy which said, “A thousand pardons, _mon capitaine_!” and the _capitaine_ began reading the newspaper aloud to his men. Scores of human touches which were French, republican, democratic!
With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned, native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing onto the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our reserve supply was not visible, and an officer’s sharp command saved us from being invested by storm.
As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were kept back out of range of the German shells, making the town a dead space between them and the firing-line which was beyond. When the Germans retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as it was their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the main square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German guns when the French infantry passed through. Soissons was not a German town.
We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters of shops that had not been torn down by shell-fire closed. Soissons was as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the ridge back of the town.
The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and see the _soixante-quinze_ and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction of the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom of an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the Germans. If that battery were on the opposite side under cover of any one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another shot--and we were not sure that the battery was not on the other side of the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery fire to one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were scattered, according to the accepted practice, and from the central firing-station word to fire was being passed first to one gun and then to another.