They will be shot to pieces. It is always
like that, in this sacred war. Oh, those sacred pigs of Germans! Those
dirty Boches! Those sacred bandits!"
"They are going to give the Boches a hard knock," said grizzled men,
who remembered in their boyhood another war. "The English army is
ready. How splendid they are, those boys! And ours are on the right of
them. This time--!"
"Mother of God, hark at the guns!"
At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered in the great
square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward was smashed, and
listened to the laboring of the guns over there by Vermelles and
Noeux-les-Mines, and Grenay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where
the French guns were at work. There were loud, earth--shaking
rumblings, and now and then enormous concussions. In the night sky
lights rose in long, spreading bars of ruddy luminance, in single
flashes, in sudden torches of scarlet flame rising to the clouds and
touching them with rosy feathers.
"'Cre nom de Dieu!" said French peasants, on the edge of all that, in
villages like Gouy, Servins, Heuchin, Houdain, Grenay, Bruay, and
Pernes.
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