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 enemy in sight yet?”

“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.

They must maintain their steady march directly toward the mouths of those guns.  John comprehended in those awful moments that the task of the French was terrible, almost superhuman.  If their nation was to live they must hurl back a victorious foe, practically numberless, armed and equipped with everything that a great race in a half-century of supreme thought and effort could prepare for war.  It was spirit and patriotism against the monstrous machine of fire and steel, and he trembled lest the machine could overcome anything in the world.

He was about to shout again to de Rougemont, but his words were lost in the rending crash of the French artillery.  Their batteries were posted on both sides of him, and they, too, had found the range.  All along the front hundreds of guns were opening and John hastily thrust portions that he tore from his handkerchief into his ear, lest he be deafened forever.