Three or
four more quickly followed. "Roll that up," said Le Gallais to the Guide
carrying the General's flag. A few minutes passed, during which we were
shot at without being able to reply. Then two Field Batteries came
galloping to the front. Guns! Guns! Way for the guns! like the
fire-engines down Piccadilly they came tearing along. As the iron wheels
strike upon rocks the guns leap and swing. Stones and splinters fly
right and left, and the dust flung up by wheel and hoof boils along
their course. Nothing is more stirring than to see guns coming full
speed into action. In another minute they have lined up on the ridge and
their shells are bursting on the enemy's hill.
Hector Macdonald is a man who always amuses me. Ordinarily he is a
somewhat grim-looking individual; but when there is any fighting going
on his whole manner changes, and he beams and mantles with a sort of
suppressed mirth. He comes swaggering up now as the guns are opening,
looking like a man who has just been told the best story he ever heard
in his life, and is still chuckling over it. "They're on to us again,"
he bubbles out, knocking his boot with his whip in irrepressible glee.
"What! what! they're on to us again." He looks round at us and grins,
and seems to lick his lips as a shell goes howling overhead and bursts
behind us. His merits as a general are very much discussed, but there is
one thing he does thoroughly enjoy, more than any man I know, and that
is being shot at.
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