Hair and gay
ribbon caught the eye, as soon as they were borne out of the doomed
houses. The father carried the little one to the bridge at the foot of
our street, and began crossing towards us. The barbed wire looked angry
in the morning sun. He had to weave his way patiently, with the child
held flat to his shoulder. Any hasty motion would have torn her face on
the barbs. Shrapnel was sailing high overhead between the two forces,
and there, thirty feet under the crossfire, this man and his child
squirmed their way through the barrier. They won through, and were
lifted over the barricade. As the father went stumbling past me, I
looked into the face of the girl. Her eyes were tightly closed. She
nestled contentedly.
"Did you get it, man? Did you get it?" I asked Rossiter.
"Too far," he replied, mournfully, "only a dot at that distance."
Now, all the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green grass
growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent,
waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it
revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding
daisies. The bark of it is as alarming as its bite--an incredibly rapid
rat-tat that makes men fall on their faces when they hear, like
worshipers at the bell of the Transubstantiation.
"She talks three hundred words to the minute," said Romeyn to me.
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