When their relief finished they crawled out again and took their places on the guns, and carried on. By nightfall every man of them was stiff with tiredness, deafened and numb with the noise and shock of the piece’s jarring recoil, weary-eyed and mind-sick with the unceasing twiddling and adjusting of tiny marks to minute scratches and strokes on shell fuses, sights, and range-drums. The deepening dusk was hardly noticed, because the running bursts of flame and light kept the dusk at bay. And dark night brought no rest, no slackening of the fierce rate of fire, or the labour that maintained it.
The whole gun-line came to be revealed only as a quivering belt of living fire. As a gun fired there flamed out in front of the battery a blinding sheet of light that threw up every detail of men and guns and patch of wet ground in glaring hot light or hard black silhouette. On the instant, the light vanished and darkness clapped down on the tired eyes, to lift and leap again on the following instant from the next gun’s spurt of vivid sheeting flame. For solid miles the whole line throbbed and pulsed in the same leaping and vanishing gusts of fire and light; and from either side, from front, and rear, and overhead, came the long and unbroken roaring and crashing and banging and bellowing of the guns’ reports, the passing and the burst of the shells.
So it went on all night, and so it went on into the grey hours of the dawn. As the “zero hour” fixed for the attack approached, the rate of fire worked up and up to a point that appeared to be mere blind ravening fury. But there was nothing blind about it. For all the speed of the work each gun was accurately laid for every round, each fuse was set to its proper tiny mark, each shell roared down on its appointed target. The guns grew hot to the touch, the breeches so hot that oil sluiced into them at intervals hissed and bubbled and smoked like fat in a frying pan, as it touched the metal.
One battery ceased fire for a few minutes to allow some infantry supports to pass through the line and clear of the blast of the guns’ fire, and the gunners took the respite thankfully, and listened to the shaking thunder of the other guns, the rumble and wail and roar of the shells that passed streaming over their heads, sounds that up to now had been drowned out in the nearer bang and crash of their own guns.