Now, you may have hated and dreaded the sound of guns all your life, as you hate and dread any immense and violent noise, but there is something about the sound of the first near gun of your first battle that, so far from being hateful or dreadful, or in any way abhorrent to you, will make you smile in spite of yourself with a kind of quiet exultation mixed very oddly with reminiscence[16] so that, though your first impression (by no means disagreeable) is of being "in for it," your next, after the second and the third gun, is that of having been in for it many times before. The effect on your nerves is now like that of being in a very small sailing-boat in a very big-running sea. You climb wave after high wave, and are not swallowed up as you expected. You wait, between guns, for the boom and the shock of the next, with a passionate anticipation, as you wait for the next wave. And the sound of the gun when it comes is like the exhilarating smack of the wave that you and your boat mean to resist and do resist when it gets you. You do not think, as you used to think when you sat safe in your little box-like house in St. John's Wood, how terrible it is that shells should be hurtling through the air and killing men by whole regiments. You do not think at all. Nobody anywhere near you is thinking that sort of thing, or thinking very much at all. At the sound of the first near gun I found myself looking across the road at a French soldier. We were smiling at each other. When we tried to get to Schoonard from the west end of the town we were stopped and turned back by the General in command. Not in the least abashed by this _contretemps_, Mr. L., after some parley with various officers, decided not to go back in ignominious safety by the way we came, but to push on from the east end of the village into the open country through the line of fire that stretched between us and the road to Zele. On our way, while we were about it, he said, we might as well stop and have a look at the Belgian batteries at work--as if he had said we might as well stop at Olympia and have a look at the Motor Show on our way to Richmond. At this point the unhappy chauffeur, who had not found himself by any means at home in Baerlaere, remarked that he had a wife and family dependent on him. Mr. L. replied with dignity that he had a wife and family too, and that we all had somebody or something; and that War Correspondents cannot afford to think of their wives and families at these moments. Mr. M.'s face backed up Mr. L. with an expression of extreme determination. The little Belgian lady smiled placidly and imperturbably, with an air of being ready to go anywhere where these intrepid Englishmen should see fit to take her. I felt a little sorry for the chauffeur. He had been out with the War Correspondents several times already, and I hadn't.